There are many reasons/factors for why we are where we are. One of the most important, if not THE most important, is “feminism 1.0″, i.e., encourage females to get educated and pursue careers in the same way that men do. Women could of course do this before the mid-’60s but it was understood by society that she would be giving something up, the most important thing. Women who pursued careers (apart from traditional female roles such as teaching, and even that many women dropped out of altogether once they had children) were considered at best sort of harmlessly odd, fine, do what you want lady, but we know that family life is superior and more important.

That’s changed. Now it’s “You MUST do this for own sake, not to do it is to not realize your potential.” And that change is a direct cause of much of what you diagnose.

The way the UMC has “solved” this problem is to send girls to college, let them launch their careers–whether in soggy girly stuff like PR or crunchy stuff like business and law–and then they marry late (~30), have kids a few years later and drop out of working at least until the kids are grown. This answers a couple of needs, not least the need for two incomes to accumulate assets so that the couple can eventually buy into a UMC school district. But the real importance of this solution is to her psyche. Getting the education and career are a way of telegraphing “I am a complete person, not some drone like June Cleaver. I am just as smart and capable as any man. In my altruistic concern for my children, I choose not to use my talent in the marketplace but to devote myself to them.” In other words, she needs that education and early career to mark her as better than a mere housewife, even though she will eventually choose to become a housewife. (It’s actually very high status in these places to stay home with your kids–IF you once had a career–and subtly frowned upon for mothers to work. A woman who never had a career is low status in the blue state UMC.)

So, 1) do you think the solution to the problems you describe requires going back or can reform be accomplished with the basic tenets of feminism 1.0 still intact? And, 2) if you think going back is essential, how would you handicap the odds?

Escoffier has done an outstanding job of describing this phenomenon. What he is describing aren’t women who work primarily to support themselves and their family, but women who use their education and career as a way to check off the box to prove their feminist credentials before settling down into an entirely traditional role. To answer his specific questions, I think we can manage this issue without formally rolling back feminism 1.0. As I see it, to the extent that this is a problem it will generally tend to resolve itself. As I said in 40 years of ultimatums, women are and should be free to pile on whatever demands regarding marriage which they see fit. If this means demanding that their husband to be wait until they have tired of playing career woman and even assuming a significant accompanying student loan debt and expensive tastes, so be it. But this must be accompanied by the freedom for men to decide whether marriage under these terms is something they want to enter into. The problem isn’t that women are making expensive demands in an effort to prove they are feminist before demanding a traditional role as wife and mother, the problem is the Social Conservatives who are standing by insisting that men marry women under these terms.

So far the much fretted marriage strike hasn’t yet materialized. However, I do think these women are taking a significant risk. To the extent that the whole “Peter Pan” meme is accurate, the current cohort of mid to late 20s women delaying marriage until their 30s have laid the groundwork for their own potential spinsterhood. Men in their age group aren’t getting as strong a signal that working hard to become a provider will result in first a LTR and later marriage. While there may be a growing number of successful men who aren’t willing to marry a woman who waited until her late 20s or early 30s to marry, I suspect the bigger issue is that a significant percentage of men haven’t felt the incentive to prepare themselves as a provider. Even worse, these women playing career pushed out men from their slots in school and the workplace. So the men they one day hope to marry both have less incentive to do the extra work and planning to become a provider and face additional obstacles to do so. Compounding this is the very strong desire these women have to marry a man who is at least as well educated and financially successful as they are. The higher their own achievement, the smaller their pool of suitable potential husbands becomes.

So what if they don’t marry? you might be asking, these are after all feminist women. They don’t need a man anyway, they have their careers! But this is where we separate the real deal feminist career women from the fakers and posers. Men and women who work hard to support themselves understand that they are in it for the duration. There is a determined realism to them. Likewise the women who work to survive until they marry and after marriage until they have children are being pragmatic and working to meet the needs of their family. These aren’t the women we are talking about. The women Escoffier described see having a career as a badge of status to be collected on their way to their ultimate goal of stay at home housewife. They aren’t really career women, they are playing career woman much the way that Marie Antoinette played peasant and Zoolander’s character played coal miner.

It is striking to me how many women my wife and I know who are roughly our age and have already burned out and abandoned their careers. These women stand out the most when they are married but don’t have children. Some time in their 30s their infatuation with the professional world evaporates and they either trade down to a more fulfilling and less demanding job or stop working altogether. Recently Forbeswoman had a piece which was long on anecdote and short on statistics claiming this is a common trend: Why Millennial Women Are Burning Out At Work By 30 (H/T W.F. Price). While I didn’t find any corroborating data in the article, enough of the women who read the article identified with the feeling that the author wrote a follow up piece just on the comments. One commenter wrote:

Sent this to my millennial gf who is a high school teacher she replied with “The author has been stalking me, apparently. Spooky how accurate this is for my life.

What happened to her can do attitude? Doesn’t she know she needs to teach men a lesson? Another commenter was more ambitious, and pursued a career in law, only to find out that it was, surprisingly, hard work and not as glamorous as on TV:

You really captured how I feel about my career. I went to college and law school with the intent of becoming a lawyer. I had never had a full time job until I graduated and I was truly shocked when I realized I had to go to work EVERY DAY ALL DAY! I had no idea what kind of lawyer I wanted to be nor that I even needed a career path once I got my first job.

As I mentioned above, I don’t worry about the trend Escoffier is describing. The path entails a fair amount of risk, especially since the woman won’t know if her plan will be successful for over a decade when she sets out for it. She may find that marrying at a later age is more difficult than she expected. Even if she achieves this part, she may find that she has outlasted her own fertility (H/T Bill). Lastly, the status Escoffier is talking about depends on the woman being able to claim she really wanted to be a career woman, but was somehow drafted into the stay at home mom role by her husband and children. It allows her to both frame herself as a feminist and a victim of the patriarchy, all while enjoying the benefits of the traditional role she really wanted all along. The Social Pathologist described how the women of his generation managed this in a post this summer (emphasis his):

Fifty percent of my medical course was composed of women, usually women who had been groomed in high school for a “power girl” existence. These were women that were going to take on and change the world. The funny thing is though, is that the vast bulk of them, once they had gotten married and had children, actually wanted to stay at home and look after the children.(Much to the disappointment of their husbands) To their surprise, they found the experience of motherhood enjoyable, even though they did not expect it to be.

The problem is this trick requires a sort of plausible deniability which becomes more and more difficult for each new generation of working women; if men like Escoffier can see it, how long before others start to get wise to the plan as well? This is after all an extremely expensive feminist merit badge to pick up prior to becoming a housewife. It only makes sense if the status of feminist martyr is actually accorded to them. If perspectives change and these women are seen instead as fakers, all will be for naught. Even worse, the men of their generation may just call their feminist bluff, leaving them to continue carrying the weight of the world on their own shoulders.

463 Responses to Playing career woman

1.) Uhg. Just … uhg. Feminists are horrid enough. Fake feminists — all of the attitude, none of the sacrifices — are beneath contempt.

2.) Kinda points out the weakness of attempting to build a society on top of the empowered, I-can-do-anything-a-man-can-do, moxy-filled, career-gal product of a feminized education system and AA-infused workplace, don’t it? Maybe the boring ol’ Beta male isn’t quite so disposable after all. Enjoy the decline!

3.) Liberals like to snark that “reality has a liberal bias”. Maybe, rather, reality (when it comes to the productive work that holds up a society) has a male bias?

4.) Anecdotally, let me just testify that I’m working hard to be a good provider. Just not for you, American Woman! Enjoy the cats!

A career woman can force her career man to pay for her to be SAHM. A career man cannot force a career woman to pay for him to be a SAHD. So the woman can keep her options open, as long as not enough men see trough this scam.

But it is even worse. Even women who are not career women are so influenced by the trendsetting UMC women that they see what they were doing before having kids as a career that they had to give up, even though they would never have reached a point where they would have been able to support a family in the life style they want.

A lawyer friend used to work in a government agency where he was the only male lawyer. The female lawyers were all married with top firm lawyers and were using their own salary as pocket money, while their husbands paid for everything else, which irritated him when he could never go and have lunch in the same fancy restaurants as them and so on, while having to cover for them at work during their many absenses.

I’d argue that feminism 1.0 was “we would like to be recognised as persons under the law, and have the *ability* to go into all areas of society, even if it is an odd and unusual woman who actually wants to be a judge”.
“all women must have careers because that is fulfilling and motherhood isn’t” was second-wave.

I think this is a problem of credibility that stretches beyond those involved. I think some just really don’t realize – they’ve been told that fulfillment comes from their career, so they devote themselves to it until they surprisingly discover that it’s not the fulfillment they were told, and staying at home with the kids sounds a lot more fun. Bur for those and the ‘check it off’ types, who leave early on to start a family, work really is just a way to play around in the meantime. The problem is that that luxury is not available to everyone. Men generally need jobs to support themselves and their families. Women often need jobs to support themselves and their families if they’re not lucky enough to have a high-earning man, or if they don’t want/can’t have children and thus a good reason to stay home. The ones that flake out demonstrate to employers that it’s not worth hiring women – to the detriment of women who need or actually want the jobs. Not helpful for the ‘team woman’ they’re supposed to be supporting.

I think the solution is education. Not ‘higher education’, but realistic education from a young age.
I think a big part of the reason that women coming up on 30 these days are burning out is because they’ve been sold a bill of professional bliss that’s completely unrealistic and inaccurate. I think there’s a similar problem for men, but with more resilience and fewer other options, more of them stick it through whether they like it or not. I think part of it is women having been taught to seek a life that is at odds with what many of them would really enjoy, but I think another part is an entire generation taught that the world can’t wait to meet them and will rise up to fulfill their dreams with little work required – As just for showing up! When the ‘career’ turns out to be more work than rainbows and unicorns, they burn out.
I think that if children and especially teens were given the truth about their abilities and aptitudes, and taught to aim for areas they might do well as well as enjoy, and given a realistic view of the tradeoffs between careers and family, expectations might be more reasonable. If all students were taught how to assess risk and odds, so as to be properly able to consider the value of taking on student loan debt to get a degree in engineering, vs the value of taking on debt to get a degree in sociology, perhaps we’d see slightly more reasonable choices.
I think there’s little you can do with completely irrational people, but we could at least try.

I’m a woman who went to college and grad school, had a career, and married in my late 20s. Became a mother in my early 30s and have been a stay at home mom since.

I don’t know about other generations but I am Generation X. I was a good student, and always pushed toward further education and a career. Marriage and motherhood were not really encouraged, maybe just assumed. My own parents were divorced, and so it seemed very risky to be financially dependent on a man. And no, my mother didn’t get bored, my father cheated on her, so staying married didn’t feel like something I could necessarily control.

Rationally, I wanted to have children, and I knew I would regret it if I didn’t. I was really surprised at how fulfilling it was to be a mom. It felt far more enjoyable and purposeful than any of my jobs had been. Starting in my 30s did result in just two kids, when I may have had more had I started younger .

I wonder how many women are really gung-ho careerists, and how many just follow that path because marriage seems elusive, and they have no idea how motherhood will capture their hearts. Single women need to pay their bills, and married SAHMs take comfort in knowing they have education and work experience should they become single again. I think yo’ure right that there’s an emotional component to it, but there’s a lot of practicality involved too.

There is no question (as a man) that I am attracted to female intelligence, and an educated woman is thus very attractive to me, all other things being equal, but women are not particularily attracted to intelligence: what attracts them, seems to be, either status, or danger (the alpha bad-boy type with muscles). The more that women take up-market male jobs however, the more likely that the number of available men will shrink – having been squeezed out, which (as Roissy constantly points out) will lead to those remaining becoming players with soft-harems. Worse still, an aging female is going to be less attractive than a younger one – by way of example an acquaintance of mine was recently telling me how (following a childless marraige) an acquaintance of his – a fairly senior Royal Navy Officer aged 50, is about to marry again; this time to a single 25 year old woman – no chance for the over 30s (never mind 40s) there. These older women will be (in my Father’s memorable expression) ‘Women whom life has passed by’ – though their hamster will surely spin it otherwise.

Yet women who are childless always insist that mother-hood is the thing they will never do. I would be quite rich if I had five dolars for every time I had heard that, and then a few years down the line heard from these same women how rewarding motherhood is and that it was the best thing they have ever done. Women do not realise what it is they really want until it has happened.

It would be nice to be able to say that for those who remain single, that they are the equal of men – some may be, but most, are not – and very obviously so, when as things do not go their way they turn on all the usual female wiles and emotions. As they see their friends pushing p’ram’s all they can do is boast on fb of their glamorous job and latest career success, but (as their looks fade, and their dating options slip ever more down-market), that success will become ever more difficult to achieve. I was talking to a legal acquaintance of mine about a woman – a young lawyer herself – I had been romantically linked with – briefly – but whom I had past up on. ‘How is she?’ I enquired. ‘She has [since you] become a hard-nosed ball-busting bitch’ he replied. I imagine she still is. A pity as she was a pretty woman with a trim figure (though not really my sort). Law (and her interest in me) was clearly at least on an unconscious level a way to meet high-status men, but as you see, it did not work out as planned – maybe this is why feminists seem to be so angry and aggressive.

In his book The Woman Racket [Imprint Academic] Steve Moxon has a lot of interesting facts and figures about women at work in Chapter 9 thereof. I imagine Dalrock would find that interesting and pertinent to this blog entry. Enjoy your Turkey.

I do get what you’re trying to say with this post, but I also believe that you’re laying the blame unfairly on women. Just how many of them do you think were raised to aim for being a housewife? And how many were told that it is really stressful to work full-time and that it’s all that rewarding? I’d bet that none, and that most of them were encouraged by their parents to get a degree, to work, and to be financially independent. That’s certainly the advice that I got from my parents, and even my conservative father told me that I shouldn’t rely on a man financially because you never know what happens (my cousins are getting the same advice from their fathers too).

As well, I don’t know of a single woman, on either my mother’s or my father’s side of the family who didn’t get a degree, and I’m going back at least several decades (including my mother, my grandmother, and also my great grandmother).Therefore, I do not understand this battle that you picked with educated/career women. Not to mention that your own wife is educated and also works.

I personally don’t see anything wrong with a woman being educated or working, as long as she does put her family first. Many women would love the choice to be able to stay at home, but one income isn’t enough to support their family. And ultimately, the money that women earn goes to their family, regardless of whether she needs to work or whether she does it to provide a higher standard of living to her family. As well, once the kids are old enough to go to school, what’s the point of her staying home?

Additionally, I do see this as being a solely North American problem, because in other countries, it is not an indication of feminism if a woman is educated or works—just look at India, China, Eastern Europe and so on; and look at Eastern female immigrants in the West—they’re better educated and better paid than their American or White counterparts. For them, it is the norm without feminism for women to be educated and to work.

“Chels says:
I do get what you’re trying to say with this post, but I also believe that you’re laying the blame unfairly on women. Just how many of them do you think were raised to aim for being a housewife?
…
Therefore, I do not understand this battle that you picked with educated/career women. Not to mention that your own wife is educated and also works.”

I’d say the blame still lies with women there – but with women of the previous generation who, while working and trying to raise their children and not doing either too well, kept telling their daughters that it’s important to have a ‘fulfilling career’, rather than owning up to a lot of ‘careers’ being just necessary work.

I think it’s very clear that he did not pick on educated women or women with careers, but rather, those who rack up big tabs in useless degrees to work for a few years with the plan all along to just do it briefly to say they have, and bail out for comfortable SAH motherhood as soon as possible. He noted a respect for women who actually plan to support themselves.

Women these days simply don’t know if/when they will get married. They also don’t know if their husbands will be able to be the sole breadwinner. I got a typical feminine degree in a human services field. The pay was mediocre but my husband sure appreciated it when I was able to use it to help him get through his grad school program. When my kids are older, I plan to pick it back up and use the extra income to help pay for college funds and paying off our house.

I do agree that people should make sure their student loans are reasonable, especially women who hope to stay at home should they marry and have kids. I think in this day and age, it’s risky for women to not be able to support themselves.

“While there may be a growing number of successful men who aren’t willing to marry a woman who waited until her late 20s or early 30s to marry, I suspect the bigger issue is that a significant percentage of men haven’t felt the incentive to prepare themselves as a provider.”

I don’t know where this spinster meme comes from, but where I live, single men outnumber single women by a significant margin, whether at bars, clubs, church, or internet dating sites. There are spinsters and single mothers out there, but they are outnumbered by lonely single men. Fortunes may change after age 40, but by then, everyone is getting fat and gray, and soon to be members of AARP.

It may be that as a society, people don’t like or trust each other as much as they used to. People are mobile, suburbs are lonely and atomized, and the divorce rate is fairly high. Women probably get educations and jobs, for a number of very rational reasons. Big ones being that their parents can see them off at 18, instead of scrounging around the suburb for a “suitor”. And another is insurance. If an educated woman marries badly, she has an out. Everyone likes insurance.

The problem is, that for women, they enjoy educations, careers, and in the event of family breakdown, default mother custody, and big child support checks, assuming they get knocked up by a man with a half decent job. For men, they are totally exposed, like the Buffet quote “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out”.

To answer his specific questions, I think we can manage this issue without formally rolling back feminism 1.0. As I see it, to the extent that this is a problem it will generally tend to resolve itself.

it will not “resolve itself”

feminism is feminism, no matter what numeral one assigns to it

ah yes! the Good Old Days of feminism 1.0!

well i was in the workplaces during feminism 1.0, and it had nothing to do with fairness, equity, egalitarianism, or any other positive attribute

in fact, it was a slaughter, resulting in the vast disenfranchisement and destruction of millions of american men — there were dozens of ways men could be hassled, RIFd, and forced from employment, and they were (all to chants of Equality and Empowerment)

this resulted in the massive unemployment of the very men needed to create, invent, and revitalize the culture. and to be fathers to sons . . . but it’s All Good, cause me and the missus now have TWO checks coming in, consume consume consume

no female should be employed, or educated, if it means a qualified male must be excluded

think that’s too harsh? then you’re not one of the boys in the US trying to become a man w/o a dad

any guy who thinks 1.0 feminism, or any feminism, is OK needs to spend a couple years living in the back of a car after Ms. Dubble Paycheck and the ssisterhood manouvers him out of his job (with, of course, the approval and assistance of Mr. Dubble Paycheck)

six months eating crackers, wearing all your clothers, and shitting in the bushes will relieve many intellects of fine distinctions and self-serving arrangements

feminism 1.0 certainly is never goint to be “formally” rolled back, b/c women and moneyed men havent felt the agony of its effects

as long as it’s just some Other Guy hey, no prob

it’ll be “informally rolled back” but by then all the damage will have been done

“anonymous says:
I don’t know where this spinster meme comes from, but where I live, single men outnumber single women by a significant margin, whether at bars, clubs, church, or internet dating sites. ”

It depends on where you are, as different places do have different demographics. Some cities have extra men, and that gives power to the available women. But there are other places with extra women and the opposite situation.

When men get a degree or go through a vocational program and then land a job, they’ve normally got 40+ years to contribute to increasing the wealth of society. Women “playing” career damage society:
1. They displace men for positions in college or vocational school.
2. Upon landing a job, they displace other men for the job position.
3. The increase in the labor pool drives down wages (supply & demand).
4. While in the labor pool, women are less effective and less productive than men.
5. Because they are in the labor pool and cannot compete with men, women support labor laws to enforce “equality” which burden businesses and can cause men to get fired due to some infringement or just to meet quotas.
6. When they leave the labor pool after becoming bored, there is now a hole than can be difficult to fill because the men who would normally fill it have been displaced for all the reasons above. There was recent discussion on some blog with a link to an article about this exact problem with physicians in the UK.

In some sense, I can agree with the comment that women were advised to pursue education and careers as the ONLY option. Women do NOT know what they want. They have to be guided. Most parents have so bought into feminism that they don’t see any other way. It’s a riot – or sad – talking to parents when they go into all the detail about choosing a college, going on campus visits, making sure she gets into the best school, etc., etc. You would think these parents would spend their time and energy on prepping their daughters for the most important life decision – choosing a man for marriage, how to make a husband happy and how to raise healthy children.

And yet, if parents were to advise their daughters to prep for marriage instead of a career, and there is a decent girl who truly wants to please her husband and raise a nice family,how would she find a man who’s in college? It would seem that the dating and courting scene would have to change as well and go back to earlier methods.

In my case and that of many of my friends it is more about family pressure than giving lip-service to feminism. The pressure to go to college and “make something out of yourself” so that your parents have something to brag about is intense.

Interesting thesis that a hypermasculine culture, child-rearing, and “father wound” led to the rise of Nazism in Germany, and that current culture is hyperfeminine with a “mother wound”. Where is it leading?

In some sense, I can agree with the comment that women were advised to pursue education and careers as the ONLY option. Women do NOT know what they want. They have to be guided. Most parents have so bought into feminism that they don’t see any other way. It’s a riot – or sad – talking to parents when they go into all the detail about choosing a college, going on campus visits, making sure she gets into the best school, etc., etc. You would think these parents would spend their time and energy on prepping their daughters for the most important life decision – choosing a man for marriage, how to make a husband happy and how to raise healthy children.

I don’t think the two have to be mutually exclusive, but my sense is today’s parents invest an enormous amount of parental energy, effort, guidance on the education/college/career stuff for their teenage/young adult daughters and basically zero parental guidance when it comes to dating/men/finding a husband, and arguably much of today’s problems come from young women basically being clueless about this area especially abiout the self-destructiveness in following their hypergamous impulse unchecked. More women probably screw up their lives much worse choosing the wrong men versus choosing the wrong college/career.

“The pressure to go to college and ‘make something out of yourself’ so that your parents have something to brag about is intense.”

Yeah, even nominally conservative families are like this. I also would not discount the possibility that the last generation of mothers suffer from some guilt, however well submerged, which adds to the pressure. For instance, my own mother worked all my life (after I was three) whereas my own children have never had their mother not home with them. My mother will sometimes make little (very little, but telling) cracks about that. It’s clear to me that she feels some retrospective guilt about her decision and sees an implied rebuke of her and women like her in the widespread choice to stay home by this younger generation of women.

On the question of intelligence and education, we used to have very effective women’s colleges that did a good job of providing women with real educations while also preparing them for marriage, wifedom and motherhood. Now, ironically, those campuses are THE most radical feminist hotbeds in the known universe (and many of them are now co-ed). The stupid movie Mona Lisa Smile was all about the deliberate destruction of the old role of these colleges and how their old mandate was evil, etc. There was one such college (still all female) near where I went to college and it was widely derided as a “finishing school for lesbians.” Mind you, the people saying that were living in what is arguably the most liberal town in the United States. “Liberal” is actually way too “right” to describe them. Then a few years later I went to grad school in another city with another women’s college, and I heard exactly the same phrase. Now I live in a town right next to (yet another) former women’s college and people say the same thing. BTW, these places are all horribly, unbelievably expensive. Why any parent pays for them I have no idea.

So, yeah, a smart UMC man does not typically want to marry a dull or uninteresting woman. The problem is, the culture now defines how interesting/worthy you are primarily through your job, even (especially?) for women. So I would not be surprised if a successful or up-and-coming young man might be embarassed to introduce the ‘rents to a young girl they might dismiss as “boring” or “unambitious.” Considering that typically the #1 agenda item that most parents have for their grown children is “Give us some grandkids!!!” this is strangely counterproductive.

This post perfectly illustrates how we’ve failed the prisoner’s dilemma as sexes; instead of co-operation, defection is the norm. Women are the primary defectors, but – thanks to their defection – men are statistically forced into a defection state. Carnivore sums this up beautifully. Even if a woman wanted to follow the relatively-healthy script of 1950, it wouldn’t work; the lack of men able to support a wife is effectively identical to a defection (PUA and jobless bum both being equally defective).

Chel, I don’t think Darlrock’s targetting this unfairly at women. He’s simply acknowledging that their the primary instigators. Susan’s comment above perfectly illustrates this – though from what I can see she seems like a wonderful woman. Unfortunately, it’s gone so far that I have no idea how to put it back into balance (aside from letting it crash). If a woman cooperates, she will be defected against – by not meeting a good man at University, not being trusted by the good men she does meet, meeting a man who is pushed out of career opportunities by her sisters, or simply discovering that a two-income household is needed.

The men, meanwhile, cannot co-operate when the default stance of woman is to defect.

I found this: “Much to the disappointment of their husbands” interesting.

I wonder what they are dissapointed by? The loss of that other income? Something else?

My wife and I discussed from very early on how kids would be handled and we agreed right off the bat, well before marriage, that she would stay home. A disagreement about something that fundamental makes for a troubled marriage, to say the least. Unlike a lot of women around here, she was never into her career. She worked to support herself and then worked for a while after we married because, why not? Money is money and she had no kids to take care of during that time. It did help us in a lot of ways get to where we are.

I read an old post by Athol Kay recently in which he cautioned against modern men from having a SAHW. His basic argument is that with all these conveniences and appliances, there’s not enough work to keep her busy, the modern female is not nearly as good at it as June Cleaver (Caitlyn Flanagan has made that point over and over), so the man ends up essentially paying for a woman’s permanent vaction and getting little for it. And, of course, she can still leave him and get paid to do absolutely nothing after a divorce.

I don’t fully buy this however. Certainly it’s true if there are no kids. Though as Steve Sailer and others have written, the underworked housewives of the past used to be very active as volunteers and doing social stuff that today mostly just does not get done. But anyway, once there are kids SOMEONE has to look after them and that is full-time at least until the youngest goes to school. Anyone you pay is going to do a worse job than all by the worst parents. And the cost is not low.

I’m also not sure that a man is at greater risk of divorce from a SAHW rather than a career gal. I don’t know if statistics on this exist and if so I have never seen them. But logically, wouldn’t a woman be more likely to stay the more dependent she is on the man? Yeah, I understand that under marriage 2.0 laws my wife could leave me, take most of my assets and force me to pay for her forever. However, her standard of living WOULD nonetheless go down, way down, in that scenario. I know that it happens regardless but at least there is a countervailing pressure if she doesn’t have her own income stream. Whereas, if she does, then divorce + alimoney = keep what she has + free money + new stud. All in all, a better deal for the more calculating and rational harpie. Plus a SAHW is likely to be more traditional and conservative in her outlook, and less femnist, than a career wife. None of this is a guarantee, of course, I’m just talking about prevalence/the odds.

Thank you Dalrock and Escoffier for putting words around what I too have seen in abundance in my own social circle. The majority of couples that Mrs. MNL and I hang with fit the bill of UMC working husband and SAHM. But within these SAHMs, there are two divisions: the wives/mothers who wear their former grad school diploma and abandoned career as a badge of accomplishment vs. those wives/mothers who can’t claim that history (who began popping-out kids instead of pursuing the “career” check box). It’s somewhat sad but both Mrs. MNL and I sense an inferiority and discomfort among the second group of women when the topic comes up in social conversation–like they’re self-conscious second class citizens who crossed an unspoken social class boundary.

The source problem, however, isn’t simply the feminist lie told to women that choosing marriage, kids, and family means they’re missing out; that they’re being short-changed, repressed, or missing their true potential. The more profound lie is told to both men and women: It’s the myth that one’s greatest fulfillment in life will come from outside the home. It’s is the “myth of the career.” And it’s taught to both men and women–though women (through feminism) have fallen much harder for it.

Kai nails this with the following comment above:

I think a big part of the reason that women coming up on 30 these days are burning out is because they’ve been sold a bill of professional bliss that’s completely unrealistic and inaccurate. I think there’s a similar problem for men, but with more resilience and fewer other options, more of them stick it through whether they like it or not.

Let’s face it. For both men and women, life in the sexy, glamorous career world shown on television is neither sexy nor glamorous in reality. When working, you’re only as good as your most recent quarter. And when not working, it’s not at all “empowering” to see your own division laid-off or outsourced. Both the man and the woman who invests their happiness in the “myth of the career” has an odd amount in common with the ex-carousel-riding spinster and her cats.

Introduce their daughters to single men in their 30s who are past the poverty-and-debt idiocy that now characterizes the immediate post-college years. Tell the daughters that they will be living with their parents until they choose a husband, and remind them how lucky they actually are to be able to skip the poverty and debt just by marrying someone who already made it through. Show them how much better off they are for turning down a “career”. If the girls MUST attend college, they should choose a college in their hometown and live at home while attending, keeping them out of the hookup scene. However, it’s best if they don’t go at all and don’t get the idea of a career in their heads.

It’s really sad how many of the supposedly conservative parents succumb to the kind of thinking Escoffier is talking about, where their daughter must go to Harvard and fake a career, just to meet a Harvard man. Sadly, most of them accept the conventional UMC values deep down and don’t even think of solutions that are truly antifeminist. If they call themselves Christian, it just means they feel like they need the help of religion to achieve conventional success.

EscoffierI’m also not sure that a man is at greater risk of divorce from a SAHW rather than a career gal.

That depends to some degree what she was doing before she got married; specifically, how many men were in her bed. A woman with a low partner count who is staying home can do all manner of things; she could give music lessons, she could do all sorts of volunteer work, she could learn new ways to cook, the list goes on and on. A woman with a high partner count could get bored, start cruising on Facebook and run across one of her old boyfriends from the carousel…

It comes back to two things: impulse control, and future-time orientation. I am starting to come ’round to the conclusion that a woman with tolerably good impulse control and future-time orientation is not likely to have ridden the carousel, so what she would do with extra time on her hands is different from what one of her sluttier sisters would do.

I don’t know if statistics on this exist and if so I have never seen them. But logically, wouldn’t a woman be more likely to stay the more dependent she is on the man?

Don’t bring logic into this. It does not necessarily apply. The man-oriented side of the web is chock full of stories from divorced men who over time have watched their ex-wives have that Wile. E. Coyote moment when the realize that the ground isn’t under them anymore. There are plenty of men and women who have thrown logic and even common sense in the trash can in the process of feeding the divorce industry.

Yeah, I understand that under marriage 2.0 laws my wife could leave me, take most of my assets and force me to pay for her forever. However, her standard of living WOULD nonetheless go down, way down, in that scenario.

But to a woman who lives in the moment, the emotional satisfaction of throwing you out of the house, yet retaining an income stream from you, plus now having the glorious options of re-living her early 20’s might be too much of an attraction to resist. On the other hand, if her early 20’s were spent with you, then her memory stream is different…

I know that it happens regardless but at least there is a countervailing pressure if she doesn’t have her own income stream. Whereas, if she does, then divorce + alimoney = keep what she has + free money + new stud. All in all, a better deal for the more calculating and rational harpie.

Could be a calculating and rational harpie, or could be a frustrated carousel rider who has seen you, Mr. Beta Herb, fail one shit test too many. Could be several things in between, too, such as a woman who follows the herd, and her “herd” is all getting divorced; could be someone who was raised to “be herself” and starts to panic when she realizes that toddlers are more work than she thought. Could be a lot of things – all of them have one thing in common, poor impulse control and a present-time orientation. Toilet training seems like it will never end…but someone who can tell herself that, yeah, it will end pretty soon won’t find it such a huge sacrifice.

Plus a SAHW is likely to be more traditional and conservative in her outlook, and less femnist, than a career wife.

Disagree with this. First, we all have some amount of feminist claptrap in our heads, thanks to the culture. Second, who are the SAHW’s friends? Who does she visit with, who are her gal-pals, who is she connected to via social media, who does she work with at a part time job or volunteer group? Women are more malleable than men in some ways. It’s one of the differences that we ignore all the time and it can and will bite. (Example: in any cult or new religion, the first wave of new adopters are almost always women. ) A man with a SAHW doesn’t have to manager her social life with an iron fist, but he ought to be aware of who is talking in his wife’s ear when he’s not around.

Or more to the point, who is whispering…

None of this is a guarantee, of course, I’m just talking about prevalence/the odds.

theprivatemanHere’s another intended consequence of this education in women trend: The more education a woman has, the fewer eligible husbands are available.

Hmm. You know, some corporations increasingly consist of a handful of Alpha men running the place and a whole herd of women in mid-level management. Viewed another way, it does look an awful lot like a soft harem…

The likelihood of a woman being awarded significant alimony for an extended period of time drops substantially if she has a career which earns significant money. That’s what Athol is talking about. It certainly is an incremental risk for a man because, in either the SAHM or non-SAHM case, she’s likely to get primary custody of the kids and therefore a CS award (which itself has a significant alimony-type element to it when you look at the levels of support). If she is a SAHM, she gets alimony on top of that. So the risk of being even *more* cleaned out on divorce is greater.

Having said that, state laws vary a lot. Texas has low alimony caps and time limits. Massachusetts, on the other hand, has lifetime alimony that a man’s second wife becomes liable to pay as well. California has a presumption of lifetime alimony for marriages over 10 years. And so on. It really depends on the state.

Even if a woman wanted to follow the relatively-healthy script of 1950, it wouldn’t work; the lack of men able to support a wife is effectively identical to a defection (PUA and jobless bum both being equally defective).

Hello Aurini! You and people who thought exactly like you chose to spend the wealth of the richest nation to have ever existed at the absolute peak of it’s power to allow as many females as possible to stay at home and gossip!

Not create a lunar base, not develop fusion reactor, not do anything grand or glorious at all!

You choose to let women stay at home and gossip!

Why would any sane person consider you anything but ten times more worthless than that “jobless bum” in the greatest depression in more than 50 years?

You enabled women to not work, but instead focus their energy towards making trouble and gossiping!

SO HOW IS THAT WORKING OUT FOR YOU?

This is what honest opposition looks like, Aurini! Your normal method of dealing with it is to get the social inferior fired! You do this cause you are a mean person who completely deserves what is going to happen!

“Escoffier says:
I wonder what they are dissapointed by? The loss of that other income? Something else?
…
I read an old post by Athol Kay recently in which he cautioned against modern men from having a SAHW.”

Perhaps the change in what they thought their wives were about. Not all men think it’s worthwhile to support someone at home. There’s also a big intellectual difference in a marriage between two spouses with careers, and one who works while the other stays home with the kids.

There’s a difference between a SAHW and a SAHM.
If you’re raising kids, it’s a decent idea to plan on one parent raising them, while the other works – classic division of labour.
But these days, housekeeping is not a full-time job. Supporting a SAHW with no children really is funding her permanent vacation. I’d advise against it as well without considering a SAHM the same thing.
The other side of that is that if you do divide the household labour into house/childrearing and outside work, the woman needs to actually take care of the house. If she’s a SAHM, it’s reasonable to expect that she will also do the majority of the cooking and cleaning – all of it if she’s still home once the kids go to school. Women who want to be paid to stay home while the man works yet also expect the man to do half of the housework are not living up to the bargain.

Well, I am going to sound like the infamous David Alexander, but please bear with me.

I don’t see how women becoming again SAHM is a good thing. I would prefer women to work so they contribute financially to the household.

Here in Europe women are brought up to work all her life and they … work all her life. They don’t protest, they see it as the way things are, the same as men. They don’t write whiny articles about how they are burned out at the age of 30. They don’t pile mountains of debt for their future husband to pay. They go to work every day. And they have a vagina… I swear.

To be fair, women usually choose jobs that are not as demanding as men’s: clerks, civil servants, teachers (although kids are unbearable), nurses, shrinks, travel agents, etc. As a result, they have time for family and they earn less. But they are not entering jobs thinking they are going to meet Mr. Big and drink Cosmos while they write a diary narrating their daily gina tingles.

Even in Latin America, high and upper middle class women also have this attitude. Low class women dream of becoming SAHMs but, at least, they don’t delude themselves thinking they are going to have “a career”.

I think this is an American problem, no doubt about it. I don’t know where this entitlement attitude comes from. It is not from feminism because this is a common evil: other societies are feminist and women don’t have this attitude. American women come to the world thinking they are princesses and I don’t know why.

Escoffier says:
“I read an old post by Athol Kay recently in which he cautioned against modern men from having a SAHW. His basic argument is that with all these conveniences and appliances, there’s not enough work to keep her busy”

I don’t agree with Athol Kay. No, we don’t have to go back to wringer washers and beating carpets, however there are couple of areas in managing a household that a woman can really shine. First by promoting the health of her family by cooking healthy meals. Instead of the garbage most families eat resulting in obesity, diabetes and other ills of “modern” society, a wife can do daily marketing to get fresh vegetables and meats and cook daily from scratch. It takes intelligence and time to do it, but the rewards in better health are worth it.

And even with all the modern conveniences, most of my married friends’ homes are a mess if you stop by unexpectedly. I don’t mean just dusting and vacuuming. Women used to take pride and have a sense of accomplishment by having neatly arranged closets and cupboards and laundry neatly folded and organized in drawers.

Of course, this isn’t arrived at automatically. Women used to be taught these things by their mothers. It was their contribution to the marriage and fulfilled their duty – running a household. And they actually enjoyed doing it. Yes, it can be drudgery at times but so, too, can a husband’s job be drudgery.

KaiThe other side of that is that if you do divide the household labour into house/childrearing and outside work, the woman needs to actually take care of the house. If she’s a SAHM, it’s reasonable to expect that she will also do the majority of the cooking and cleaning – all of it if she’s still home once the kids go to school. Women who want to be paid to stay home while the man works yet also expect the man to do half of the housework are not living up to the bargain.

+1 on that, and the same goes for any SAHW who wants to hire a housecleaner, absent some sort of serious health issue. Maintaining a house at an acceptable level of tidiness and cleanliness is just not a full time job. Too many people pretend that “housekeeping” is somehow no different than it was 100 years ago. That’s bunk, caused by ignorance of history.

Nobody, but nobody in any industrialized nation is building a fire in the back yard to heat up a 5 gallon pot of water as the first step to “washing clothes”, ok? There’s a reason Monday was washday 100 years ago – washing and drying clothes took up the entire day, and the loads of clothing involved weren’t that big. The same amount of washing today we can get done better in a couple of hours at the coin op laundry.

Oh, forgot. THE most, most, topmost important task which allows a woman to mold the future and have a real impact on the world is to home school her husband’s children. I know if I had children, I wouldn’t be sending them to the caustic environment that is public education. My wife would be home schooling them.

Carnivorethere are couple of areas in managing a household that a woman can really shine. First by promoting the health of her family by cooking healthy meals. Instead of the garbage most families eat resulting in obesity, diabetes and other ills of “modern” society, a wife can do daily marketing to get fresh vegetables and meats and cook daily from scratch. It takes intelligence and time to do it, but the rewards in better health are worth it.

Agreed and what’s more it costs less in the short run as well. Paying people to cook for you, whether in a sit-down restaurant, a fast food drive through or a remote factory costs money. Years ago i noticed that a lot of processed food including lunch meat costs per pound more than sirloin steak, while an 8 pound ham was much less expensive per pound. Nothing has changed in the years since except the prices in US Dollars, but the ratios are pretty much the same as then.

Women use to make careers out of being homemakers… it was taken as seriously as any career would be. The husband was the boss who she answered to. If he wanted homemade bread every morning for breakfast with a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice and her looking pretty in heals and pearls then she woke up at 5am and got to work on it.

I think this is an American problem, no doubt about it. I don’t know where this entitlement attitude comes from. It is not from feminism because this is a common evil: other societies are feminist and women don’t have this attitude. American women come to the world thinking they are princesses and I don’t know why.

There is something rotten in America.

Interesting observation. I suspect the difference is the combination of Feminists with Social Conservatives reinforcing them. I don’t think the other countries in the west have this specific cocktail in the proportions we have in the US.

CarnivoreOh, forgot. THE most, most, topmost important task which allows a woman to mold the future and have a real impact on the world is to home school her husband’s children. I know if I had children, I wouldn’t be sending them to the caustic environment that is public education. My wife would be home schooling them.

Then you’d want her to have a real-deal BA in History or English LIt, or maybe a BS in biology, chemistry, etc. so that she’d be up to the intellectual challenge. Trouble is, those degrees have been so dumbed down that mostly they aren’t worth the trouble, unless she went to Grove City or some other rigorous school. Maybe it’s time to bring back the Harvard Classics, the famous “five foot shelf of books”? Time was, most people in the US learned either by doing, or by reading on their own. Spoon feeding learning was for grades 1 – 8 at the most.

Maybe we should start with changing the nomenclature. “Stay-at-home mom” sounds like about the worst marketing job ever. Who knows how many women insist upon a “career” just so they can go see some of their peers every day?

Many women are not “making expensive demands in an effort to prove they are feminist before demanding a traditional role as wife and mother.” They want to be educated and to work, but they also want to take time to raise their children. It’s not an unreasonable desire, and many couples make it work. The underlying sub-text of this discussion seems to be a deep-seated desire to swing the balance of power firmly back to men. If a woman isn’t educated and has no job or career skills, then she basically has no power and no options – her husband has all of the power and all of the options. So he can do whatever he wants, including abusing her and cheating on her, and she’s basically stuck. Just like in the good old days.

Here is an extract from page 148pp. in the book of Steve Moxon with respect to the topic AR talked about (link to the book can be found above):

“The sexual division of labour: The distinction between male breadwinner and female home-maker roles that underlies the different attitude of the sexes to work, is so great that it’s often claimed that housework is somehow imposed on women as part of men’s supposed ‘oppression’ of them. Men’s burden as ‘wage slaves’ is said to be more than offset by women doing all the housework, which curtails the scope women have to participate in the jobs market, making their choices, such as part-time rather than full-time working, forced. This is all myth. The cry of ’women work more’ has by repetition assumed truth. Hakim is absolutely conclusive:

‘Adding together market work, domestic and childcare work, the evidence for the 1970s onwards is that wives and women generally do fewer total work hours than husbands and men generally, and that women’s dual burden of paid work and family work is diminishing.’

The gap was five hours per week in the USA in 1991, though very recent studies—as Hakim has pointed out to me—show the total work hours of the sexes to be the same. A misleading picture of overworked women has built up partly through a focus on mothers with young children, as if this period is typical of their whole life. It‘s typical of only a few years. Children need far less care as they get older, and then leave home. More misleading still is to include as work women’s natural nurturing behaviour towards their children, as if it’s an onerous task on a par with working for an employer. Economists would see it not as productive work but as consumption, because it loses its value to the mother if someone else was substituted to carry it out. Much housework would also not be work, given a reluctance to delegate even to the husband.And it can’t be claimed that women who stay at home or work part-time are doing unpaidwork. They are paid directly for doing housework and childcare by their full-time working partners. That women who combine work proper and housework are not having the hard time juggling demands on their time that it is made out, is provided by analyses of what women get up to when they are full-time homemakers. Inefficiency is hardly the word, according to Hakim. If you include activities that look like housework but are done for pleasure, then half the hours are wasted and far from being work really represent consumption:

‘Studies of full-time home-makers reveal a remarkable lack of concern with efficiency; on the contrary, tasks are constantly expanded into huge amounts of unnecessary make-work…endlessly repeating the same unskilled tasks. Full-time home-makers cleaned and shopped daily instead of weekly, washed and ironed sheets twice aweek instead of once a month….Variations in hours spent on domestic work are not explained by the number of children being cared for, access to labour-saving equipment and other amenities, or the purchase of more services in the market. One explanation for the reluctance of husbands to help with domestic work is the suspicion that there might be no need for it’ (Silverman & Eals, 1994).

Men by contrast are reluctant to divert effort into looking for dirt they fail to see—research confirms that men are poorer than women at spotting objects in an array, and this explains why men literally tend not to see dirt. Why should a man do housework to a partner’s higher standards than his own, when this is his partner’s domain, and is something she does well
and (as studies reveal) is not so easily bored by—and may even enjoy?”

“MNL says:
The social statistics are fairly consistent on this. Child outcomes are better for children raised by SAHMs than from working mothers”

Can we control for choice? I’d suspect that the type of woman who is interested in staying home with her kids is the type of mother who is likely to assist outcomes even if she weren’t at home.
Or more especially, the type of woman who wants to work rather than stay home with the children might not bring those benefits even if she were forced to stay home with them.

My mother worked full-time until I was 14. I’m pretty sure I was MUCH better off in daycare than at home – my mother was simply not a person well-suited to childrearing.

American women come to the world thinking they are princesses and I don’t know why.

The influence of mass consumerism, the glorification of single motherhood, the welfare environment, the “you go, girrrrl” be-all-the-underwater-basket-weaving-historian you can be thing, you name it…it’s quite a list.

I think the solution is education. Not ‘higher education’, but realistic education from a young age.
This.
and this:no female should be employed, or educated, if it means a qualified male must be excluded

And a lot of what Carnivore outlined, as well.

There is very little reason for a woman to not earn money from home. It would have been the norm, traditionally speaking – the new sahm model who requires a housekeeper and a part-time sitter for her 2.3 kids is just goofy.

“Then you’d want her to have a real-deal BA in History or English LIt, or maybe a BS in biology, chemistry, etc. so that she’d be up to the intellectual challenge. ”

I disagree. For grades K-8, a high school education is sufficient to be a teacher. Yes home schooling high school is an issue. But that brings up the entire mess that is public education in the USA. If there were no public schools there would be many more private options, cheaply available, and tailored to the aptitude of each child. And young adults would be able to enter the working world earlier as apprentices or interns instead of being caged and tended by baby sitters.

For better or worse, college is where a woman goes to meet a husband. Those are the more conservative women, amenable to relatively early marriage. The others will wait until after grad school or career. That may be an expensive way to meet a mate but it’s fairly standard.
I would also say that even conservative parents often advise their daughters to get an education so that they “won’t have to depend on a man” “just in case”. I think that’s a poisonous piece of advice and it’s one that I’ll never give my daughter.

I agree with Dalrock that something has to give. Not sure what/when/what form, etc. But the current system is a waste in exactly the opposite way that people assume.

The operating assumption of feminists and the parents of educated girls (categories not necessarily exclusive) is “Why would you want to waste all that talent and work to be a housewife??” This is especially true when mom & dad shelled out six figures to send Jenny to college. And it’s even truer when she’s doing something they can brag about. “Jenny went to Yale and now she’s Director of PR for Conde Nast! She gets to go to swell parties and travels a lot!”

However, some of my wife’s friends report the exact opposite feeling. That is, “Why the hell did I go into debt for law school when I’m probably never going to practice again, the debt will take decades to pay off, and I’d rather be home with my kids anyway?”

In the same way the people like Peter Thiel say that education overall is a bubble, education and career-mongering of soon-t0-be moms is a huge opportunity cost. I mean, fine, go to college, learn something, learning is great. You’ll be a better wife and mother if you know stuff. And, yeah you will probably need a job before you find a husband who can support you. But if the real endgame is land in a UMC marriage with one earner, then spending hundreds of thousands on education and professional school and many years as a low level drudge in a profession with a very narrow apex is probably not worth it.

Unless the status marker is just THAT important. Which I suppose it might be, we’ll see.

I don’t think the issue is of a homeschooler having a great deal of knowledge and education to pass on, so much as having the intellectual abilities to teach a curriculum. Which might be better developed in someone who has taken a degree in an intellectually challenging subject. (English Lit not included. Seriously?)
I don’t have a lot of favourable stuff to say about the public education system, but I don’t think homeschooling is a solution for everyone. It takes certain skills to teach, and your average mother likely doesn’t have them. I think a kid’s likely better off with some other children and a person who knows how to teach.
That said, the ability to teach is not screened in modern education faculties, so I’m not saying that public school is any more certain to have a competent teacher.

To be fair, women usually choose jobs that are not as demanding as men’s: clerks, civil servants, teachers (although kids are unbearable), nurses, shrinks, travel agents, etc. As a result, they have time for family and they earn less. But they are not entering jobs thinking they are going to meet Mr. Big and drink Cosmos while they write a diary narrating their daily gina tingles.

Even in Latin America, high and upper middle class women also have this attitude. Low class women dream of becoming SAHMs but, at least, they don’t delude themselves thinking they are going to have “a career”.

I think this is an American problem, no doubt about it. I don’t know where this entitlement attitude comes from. It is not from feminism because this is a common evil: other societies are feminist and women don’t have this attitude. American women come to the world thinking they are princesses and I don’t know why.

In the US, it has become a status marker, as Dalrock points out, in the upper middle class (UMC) — that is, look at us, we can afford to have the SAHM scenario, which the studies show is better for kids. Kind of like the better diets in the UMC, on average, as well, in the US, as compared with the Joe and Jane sixpacks. Most non-UMC women also work in the US, are not in “careers”, and do it because they need the money — and, yes, typically in jobs that offer them more time and flexibility. Because they have to — there isn’t enough money to live on a single income. Most don’t complain that much about it, either — these aren’t the women Dalrock is writing about. Dalrock is writing about women with professional school type degrees who are on professional career tracks on the same financial level as their future husbands (although typically a few years behind, such that the husband is “ahead” career/finance wise, which is what enables the UMC SAHM scenario to begin with).

It’s increasingly a class marker. This is also one of the reasons why the divorce rate among UMCs is lower, too. A part of it is future time orientation being greater, to be sure. But another part is that in the current UMC set between, say, 33 and 50, there is now, again, a stigma to being divorced. Again, based on studies as well in terms of the impact on the kids. So there is a stigma, of sorts, against the professional career mother working at least until the kids are in school, and there is a stigma against divorce — again, in the rather small slice that is truly UMC (around 5% of the population, but well overrepresented on blogs on the internet).

It takes certain skills to teach, and your average mother likely doesn’t have them. I think a kid’s likely better off with some other children and a person who knows how to teach.

I would disagree – the industrial school model based on “professional” teachers, a lot of school really, is a feminist/collective aspiration. While I don’t think most women are equipped to teach a full-scale classical curriculum without a good deal of outside help, it’s fairly straightforward and entirely manageable. The “techniques” of teaching are busy work invented by Normal colleges.

That doesn’t prove anything; that study just says that children whose mothers stayed at home during their first year of life are better off. In Europe and in Canada, mothers get at least 1 year of maternity leave, and in some countries, even 3 years.

As well, I do not see why a woman should stay at home once her kids are old enough to go to school. I’m completely against homeschooling, and I find it useless/unnecessary.

Most kids in the past and now have 2 working parents, and they’re all fine, they’re not lacking in anything.

The social statistics are fairly consistent on this. Child outcomes are better for children raised by SAHMs than from working mothers (and yes, it’s true even after controlling for other factors). Just to scratch the surface:

That doesn’t prove anything; that study just says that children whose mothers stayed at home during their first year of life are better off. In Europe and in Canada, mothers get at least 1 year of maternity leave, and in some countries, even 3 years.

As well, I do not see why a woman should stay at home once her kids are old enough to go to school. I’m completely against homeschooling, and I find it useless/unnecessary.

Most kids in the past and now have 2 working parents, and they’re all fine, they’re not lacking in anything.

*If* you have the money to do it on your own dime.
If you’re rich enough to afford to spend four years learning just for the sake of learning, have at it! If you need to work for a living, only go to school if it’s going to increase your earning power. If you need to take out debt to go to school, only do it if it will significantly increase your earning power. This is gender-neutral.

People who talk about the benefits of a classical education for the expansion of the mind alone seem to forget that only rich men did it.

I am a ‘jobless bum’ by my definition. I work as little as I can, to earn enough to pay for a motorcycle and gasoline, while drinking copious ammounts of whiskey, and occasionally allowing a soft harem to surround me.

Personally I think if you’re disenfranchised by the left, and despised by the right, you must be doing something right; those qualifications certainly apply to me.

I was simply pointing out that society is broken; once it’s broken, there’s no sense in investing. I would like to live in an age full of honest men and women, and no government, but I don’t; so I’m not going to play the game as if I were.

PT Barnum: I can’t tell if we are True Brothers, or if we hate one another.

I’d rather that women stayed home, and allowed us Men to conquer Mars. Quite frankly, I think the idea of bringing (most) women into the workplace is idiotic; to a large extent, they are incompetent, and more trouble than they’re worth. I just now wrote a post about that.

Funny how you’d like your preference enforced on people who most assuredly don’t feel the same way about it.

How totalitarian of you, Chels. You don’t even have kids of your own, yet you advocate parents not have the freedom to chose to educate their own children as they see fit.

Projecting much huh? I didn’t say I’m against homeschooling in that I want to ban it or force others to send their kids to public school, but that I’m against it for myself, I wouldn’t do it. Whatever floats your boat, for all I care.

“Saint Velvet says:
I would disagree – the industrial school model based on “professional” teachers, a lot of school really, is a feminist/collective aspiration. While I don’t think most women are equipped to teach a full-scale classical curriculum without a good deal of outside help, it’s fairly straightforward and entirely manageable. The “techniques” of teaching are busy work invented by Normal colleges.”

I don’t mean the ‘how to organize a classroom’ and ‘how to set up a curriculum’ or any of that.
I mean the ability to look at someone doing something, and be able to figure out where they are going wrong or what they don’t understand, and the ability to explain the proper way to do it by finding words they can understand.

I’ve seen many teachers who can deliver a great lecture, but when a student asks a question, cannot surmise what the issue is and answer it in a way to help the student to grasp.
I’ve been a teacher of a number of things including physical skills and intellectual concepts (but never school), and I’ve also been a trainer of teachers. The majority of ‘teachers’ I’ve seen (even of those self-selecting as interested) don’t have the ability to see where a student is going wrong (in a physical skill or a mental process) and help them fix it. I think teaching (well) calls for a particular skillset that not everyone has (male or female).
I suspect it is a more systemizing process-based way of thinking, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it were more often seen in men, but I think a majority of the population in general isn’t very good at it.

I’m glad you’re a feminist who uses birth control. Don’t have children. They deserve better than a potential mother who believes as you do.

Yes, I use birth control and yes, I will send my kids to public school. It’s only my and my husband’s business how we will raise our kids, not that a bunch of fundies. What was that talk about being totalitarian?

My personal life is none of your business.
And yet, you keep telling us about it. Silly Chels.

I think teaching (well) calls for a particular skillset that not everyone has (male or female).
I would submit that what’s missing isn’t so much a skillset, but the lack of the singular skill of learning through observation (which is, ironically, the point at the primary level anyway), coupled with lack of exposure to much of anything meaningful. A vested parent should be able to determine how a child learns, how to direct and redirect, etc, just by the mere accomplishment of having themselves survived to the age of majority. No, sadly, I suppose in real world 2011 most people don’t know how to do that – we take our babies to classes so they’ll know how to be…babies.

As for more sophisticated material (STEM, professional fields) I would hope that those gifts would be recognized and supplemented early, and if a child isn’t so gifted, that the education continues in the “realistic” vein you mentioned before. That’s parenting as much as teaching.

Random stranger? LOL I’m very familiar with your views, beliefs and attitudes from months of reading your daily commentary both here and at Alte’s.

This is not personal…as we do not know each other IRL. But I certainly will attack your expressed views that you contribute to the debate here. You essentially are still repeating feminist meme’s and shibboleths, same as you regularly did at Alte’s. I have no need to try and convince you just how wrong or misguided you are. I know exactly how obstinate you are in clinging to your beliefs.

You see nothing wrong with children being raised by the public schooling system while both parents work full time careers. This is basically materialistic-driven selfishness at the expense of the children who need substantial and meaningful relationships with both of their parents more than they need institutional brainwashing.

It’s not personal at all Chels….it’s just that you make a great poster child to easily be made an example of.

I was simply pointing out that society is broken; once it’s broken, there’s no sense in investing. I would like to live in an age full of honest men and women, and no government, but I don’t; so I’m not going to play the game as if I were.

PT Barnum: I can’t tell if we are True Brothers, or if we hate one another.

I’d rather that women stayed home, and allowed us Men to conquer Mars. Quite frankly, I think the idea of bringing (most) women into the workplace is idiotic; to a large extent, they are incompetent, and more trouble than they’re worth. I just now wrote a post about that.

No Government? Women stay home?

I assume you mean the absolute minimum government possible.

In the event of these two things, how do you think a Mars colony would happen?

I know, I know, if oil flowed from the ground in vast and unceasing quantities at designated areas and all the carbon was magically scrubbed from the environment and Mother Nature had some kind of magical, automatic birth control to limit population growth and who knows what the *bleep* else, then yes we could have Very Very Small Government, Women Stay at Home, and Mars colonies.

Ughhh, so the fundies/traditionalists/conservatives have come out of hiding.

And yet, you keep telling us about it. Silly Chels.

No, Cottage Child, I’m not telling you anything about it, but strangely, that makes you more curious *rolls eyes*

Random stranger? LOL I’m very familiar with your views, beliefs and attitudes from months of reading your daily commentary both here and at Alte’s.

Yes, you are a random stranger, and I’m also familiar with your views. You’ve tried many times until now to try to change mine, and you can’t, so how about you just give up? I really do not mind at all being ignored by you.

You see nothing wrong with children being raised by the public schooling system while both parents work full time careers. This is basically materialistic-driven selfishness at the expense of the children who need substantial and meaningful relationships with both of their parents more than they need institutional brainwashing.

Families with a SAHM are an American exception as in very, very few countries, it is thought that working mothers are somehow harming their children (like another poster was mentioning). In most countries, children grow up with 2 working parents, and they’re not harmed. Is the whole world falling apart? Nope, they’re not. Children do not need their mother to stay at home with them 24/7; what they need is meaningful interactions with their parents; quality is more important than quantity.

It’s not personal at all Chels….it’s just that you make a great poster child to easily be made an example of.

LOL and you’re a perfect example of how NOT to act. Do you really not see just how repulsive your black and white views are?

Never mind that the global economy is turning to shit and the Western world’s fiat wars on foreign wars continues to expand….Chels world is just fine, she’s got a marvelous education, a degree, a career and an Alpha boyfriend! Oh, and she stands up for all teh menz in her mind!

Wait….how would I know all this?

Oh yeah, sorry, I forgot. Chels never talks about her personal life! We’re just random strangers attacking her for no good reason.

Ummm, is the world falling apart because people are having mommy issues since she worked? Seriously now, make better arguments or STFU.

And I stopped posting on TC to get away from you people, so I will now stop responding to any of your comments because we’ve had this discussion numerous times before, and I would think that should be sufficient.

Ummm, is the world falling apart because people are having mommy issues since she worked?

LMAO

The irony that you would write this at this very blog shows just how incapable you are of grasping the big picture of the concepts Dalrock posts about, and what most of us discuss here. You fail to realize that why YES, in a roundabout way, the world is falling apart because of mommy issues! It’s essentially the root of much the problems of our current reality.

Yes, this thread has indeed been sufficient in once again showing precisely what you actually contribute to the debate here.

As a SAHM with a school-age child, I have some ambivalence about out-of-home work. I worked before we had our son, full-time for years, but then I stayed home, partly because he was adopted at almost 10 months and we were advised to spend as much time with him as possible to aid bonding, but mostly because I really wanted to be with him. I’d spent so long and tried so hard to have a child, I couldn’t imagine giving him to other people for most of his waking hours.

Honestly, I don’t know if the studies about working mothers and children’s health/development are true or false or contain some of both. There are strong, strong opinions on both sides and I’m sure studies have been done and re-done to get evidence that supports those opinions. What I do know is that I couldn’t pay someone else to love my son as much as I loved him and I couldn’t pay someone else to know him or have him know me as much as we mutually do now. I have the kind of relationship with him that comes from spending all day, every day with another person. Sometimes that’s intense, sometimes we clash, but I invested the time in that relationship, and I think it was worth it. He is most likely the only child I will ever have.

I assumed that I would go back to work, at least part time, when he went to school full time, but that was right around the time the economy crashed, property values tanked, and public library jobs got a lot harder to find. So I taught myself to cook better and bake. I learned to garden and put in raised beds, and I canned/froze/dried my produce. I spruced up the house and addressed repairs that had been put on the backburner. As of now I do everything around the house, in and out, except mow the tiny part of the lawn that isn’t cultivated. I pay the bills and do the taxes. My husband works a full-time job and does a little side work that he finds personally enjoyable, but when he comes home, he puts up his feet, eats a home cooked meal, and relaxes. I walk my son to school, I walk him home, I do his homework with him, I read to him at night, I take him to see his grandparents and cousins every week so he can have a real relationship with his extended relatives. I also volunteer hours at his school library every week and lead a cub scout den. Having me home makes all of hours lives less stressful and generally healthier. I worry sometimes that I am not pulling my weight, but my husband wants me to stay home, and financially we would not be that further ahead if I did work. By the time taxes, and child care, and all of those things you wind up paying other people to do when you are too busy to do them came out of my check, it would hardly be worth it, especially since I would just save it and all the savings vehicles – savings accounts, CD’s, bonds, stock market – seem pretty shaky and yield very little return at present.

We spend our money thriftily, but I feel we have a rich life together in the things that matter, especially time with each other.

“financially we would not be that further ahead if I did work. By the time taxes, and child care, and all of those things you wind up paying other people to do when you are too busy to do them came out of my check, it would hardly be worth it”

This is true and true across a range of circumstances. Even if the woman is making “professional” big city money, well, factor in the commute, the hours, the wardrobe, the takeout, the travel, the child care, everything, and you are not really netting much. Some uber-professionals in the Big Blue cities make a lot of coin but what I always come back to is, if you have a choice, why would you pay someone else to spend all day with YOUR kids? You pay people to do things that either you are incapable of doing or that you just don’t want to do.

We spend our money thriftily, but I feel we have a rich life together in the things that matter, especially time with each other.

Grerp, you too are a poster child for this debate, but of a different variety.

You need no commendation for doing what you do, your reward is the relationship you have with your son. This is what Chels fails to grok after all this time spent debating all the folks round the manosphere. It is precisely why I asked her nicely (pretty please?!?) to remain vigilant and diligent with her birth control, like the good little feminist that she is.

Personally, I think the world could do with a few more feminists failing to replicate.

I think marriage market is heavily distorted in the US, because for some reason successful men in 30-45 age group often go after 30+ year old ex-sluts. Historically a high MMV wife candidate for successful men was: 1) Young (not older than 25) 2) From a good family 3) Virgin or very low count. That makes perfect sense, in terms of sexual attractiveness, bonding and fertility. If successful men start to value women reasonably, then the SMP and MMP will become much healthier

Modern sexual marketplace and marriage marketplace can be fixed with healthy dose of shaming. We need to shame men. We need to shame financially successful men who marry single mothers, ex-sluts and older women. If it’s known that a single mother has NO chance of a man with good income marrying her, then it will make many women decide against becoming single mothers. It worked like this for millenia, women always knew that they could become single mothers if they wanted, but it would destroy their MMV, so they didn’t do it

Home-schooled children consistently beat public school children in standardized tests, that is simply fact. If you want your children to excel, teach them yourself. Teachers get a degree in education, which often translates into ‘the current theories of how to teach better’, with little more knowledge about the actual subjects than they had in high school. A dedicated parent, teaching just their kids, will do better than all but the best professional teachers. There are many teaching aids and learning guides available to the home-schooler, it’s not like you’re alone without any direction. Finally, as a bonus, you get to really learn the material you thought you learned (or forgot) as a youngster.

Even in Latin America, high and upper middle class women also have this [they’re gonna get a job outside the home/have a career] attitude.

It’s perhaps noteworthy that Latin America still has a robust servant culture, most likely due to the real income inequalities present there. A SAHW doesn’t make a lot of sense when you have a live-in maid and/or cook.

Not sure how this works with children. That’s an on-going area of research.

As an MRA type that likes the Idea of involuntary childless sprinterhood. This article is like a bomb damage assessment photograph of the future. Some burned out chick working not to privide for anybody or be apart of something nope a woman working to show other woman her credituals. Nothing more than a boob job or a new designer purse. Or the classic “I’m a christian woman” to show status. Two things a woman has as part of the essense of who she is status in reletivity to other women and hypergamy. That is everything and they will and have killed over that.
Back to the career girl carousel rider. Sex and the city gets off carousel and finds not takers right about the time she burns out on the job. Involuntary childless spinsterhood would be an awesome lifes torment for an entitled princess.

For those who think the public school system ruins children and all mothers should be full-time mothers…
Do you also think that fewer women should have children? Because while I think that the pool of women interested in motherhood comprises some 90% of women, and the pool of those who want to be mothers and can be decent at it probably 75% of women, I’d suggest that if motherhood means ‘staying at home with your child its whole first 16ish years, doing all the housework, doing all the childcare, and homeschooling and doing it well to raise a well-educated, well-adjusted child’, I’d say we’re down to 40%, maybe 50% of women who should be ‘mothers’ by that definition – and that’s ignoring those for whom the father might not be able to solely provide for a family of 4+.
Right now, homeschoolers might do better – because the pool self-selects for people devoted enough to homeschool. If being at home were a necessary part of motherhood, that’s a lot fewer women who would be interested and skilled at it. I think supporting that as the only valid form of motherhood also means supporting women in NOT procreating if they are not suited to that form.

Every month I get a magazine from the graduate business school I attended. You have all the class updates in the back based on the year or class. The school is a nationally top five ranked program.

The updates section always has blurbs from women graduates on how they had another kid and are now stay at home moms. It is also loaded with wedding pictures from female graduates. At times it seems like bragging. Playing career woman indeed.

One caveat – while your son is small and especially since you say he will probably be your only child – in the back of your mind always prepare for the time when he gets older. He will begin to gravitate more to your husband, which should be encouraged, and the time will come when the apron strings have to be cut. Women always worry about security, but you have nothing to fear. A son raised as such will always have a very big place in his heart for his mother.

Interesting observation. I suspect the difference is the combination of Feminists with Social Conservatives reinforcing them. I don’t think the other countries in the west have this specific cocktail in the proportions we have in the US.

In my opinion, what has happened in USA is …. the Perfect Storm. Feminism has been more virulent than in other countries because it built on a foundation of female pedestalization (that is female entitlement) that comes from centuries ago.

Do you see feminism in other countries? Yes. Do you see that feminism is damaging everywhere? Of course. Do you see feminism is as virulent in other countries as in America? No way, José. I am from Europe, I have lived for 11 years in Latin America and one year in America. I tell you that American females are different.

For example, in other countries, feminist can whine about the imaginary pay gap, about the need to reconcile family and work and so on and so forth. But you won’t see feminist creating a “goddess cult” where a woman is a goddess (read “The feminist mistake”). This would be so laughable that it is unimaginable to think that anybody can tell it outside a humor TV show. No non-American feminist has said that men have to be exterminated (Valerie Solanas) or their number has to be greatly reduced (Mary Daly).

But this nonsense has been told in America once and again while people said nothing. Even people like Mary Daly have become cultural icons. Or Opprah or women’s studies tell nonsense once and again.

In my opinion, this is because America has a severe case of female pedestalization.

Do you think manginas are only produced after feminism? Think again. In the first years of the XX century, Jung explained that American husbands are the sons of their wives so there is no sexual tension. Today we would say that American husbands have become betaified.

Do you think female entitlement is only produced after feminism? I read an excerpt of “Democracy in America” where a woman was travelling in a carriage and occupying two seats (one for her and one for her bags) while a man was standing up throughout the travel.

In my opinion (and this is a topic I want to study more when I have the time), American culture has always been characterized by female pedestalization and entitlement.

Maybe this is caused by your Puritan past. Priests in Catholic countries have traditionally taught that woman is evil because she is the source of sexual temptation. Women had to be like Mary: mothers, submissive to the will of the Lord. No wonder feminist oppose the symbol of Mary. People who were confirmed bachelors were not seen as weird, maybe because priests don’t marry. But spinsters were pitied. (I am talking about the culture until 30 years ago)

By contrast, the Puritan were more interested in building families so female pedestalization was part of the deal (read “Albion’s seed”). The fact that America was a land of frontier may have needed to pedestalize women to make men willing to economically support them. It is something akin to the cows in India: they are sacred because they are in danger of being killed for her meat (bulls are not in such danger because they are use to work the land).

The female pedestalization reached their peak in Victorian years, where women were deemed to be pure angels. This happened only in English-speaking countries. In other countries, Victorianism simply didn’t happen.

So we have two elements of the Perfect Storm: a traditional culture of female pedestalization and feminism. And the third element is affluence. The impressive economic development of America (after the World War II, USA produced 50% of the world’s GDP) meant that there were lots of money to waste in non-productive endeavors.

In summary, when feminist told women they could have it all, American women believed them and thought this was their right (because they were used to be put on a pedestal). When American women demanded changes in law and society to get these demand, American men complied, because they were used to do whatever women said (female pedestalization). And all the changes could be applied because there was money in excess to spare (affluence).

imnobody. Yes and no. Sweden is a very feminist country with a a high female participation in the job market and heavily subsidized day care, but only 10 % of women with kids under 8 work full time. So at least women take a long break. If one adds work and domestic chores married men with young kids are the people who work most of all in Sweden according to the office of statistics (SCB).

@imnobody –
Another very important reason feminism has been so successful in the USA, which you didn’t mention, is that our ruling elite financed and pushed it behind the scenes with the express purpose of destabilizing father headed families.

imnobody: Excuse me for my curiosity, but why dont you say which country you are from? Is it because it is a small country and stating it would make you less anonymous? I am asking because the culture in different European countries is very different and it helps to know which country we are talking about.

I also take care not to say things that make me easy to identify. There is always an off chance that someone you know might be at the sama forum. I once identified a guy a know from what he was saying about his CV one time and a campaign poster we had both seen in the same building another time, and that was truly eery. I stopped posting there, so that I would not be kind of reading his diary.

Ughhh, those homeschoolers sure are nasty. Is the only way to be a good parent to homeschool? Or is it the best way? No, it isn’t; the majority of the world’s children are educated in the public school system and they grow up just fine. There are many, many good schools in Ontario, so I have no fears about putting my children in one. As well, I don’t believe that public school is like going to the big, bad devil, or that we are putting our kids in any harm.

Furthermore, there are plenty of conservatives and traditional Christians who put their kids in the public school system. A few names that come to mind are Ulysses/Athol Kay/Terri/Dalrock, do you have the courage to go and tell them that they are horrible, horrible parents who should have never had kids?

And you know, for a random stranger on the Internet, KG, you sure are too preoccupied with my own personal life and with the choices we make. Oh, I can guarantee at least 2 mini-Chels’ so I hope you go jump off a cliff, you ignorant asshole.

I do think fewer should, considering over half of children are born outside of marriage or even ltr. I could go into the return of shunning women who get knocked up and their bastard children but it’s a holiday weekend and I’m trying to be less judge-y.

and that’s ignoring those for whom the father might not be able to solely provide for a family of 4+.

There would be fewer of those if more wives stayed home (or husbands, if that’s the agreement) and quit subdividing wages and sucking taxes into social structure program jobs, (teachers/social workers, primarily). We have all these jobs that women do, that we pay taxes for, and yet if we did those jobs ourselves – essentially caring for our own families and children – we wouldn’t need but a handful of them. What should be the exception has become the rule.

I do not think it’s necessary for the mom to stay at home to have that kind of a relationship with one’s mother/father. I was public schooled and I have the same relationship with both of my parents, so do most of my friends. I do believe that quality is way more important than quantity.

I don’t believe that, but considering the agenda is largely feminist, why would I make my job harder than it already is? My husbands children do not need to be taught to marginalize him, that he’s a nice idea but not really necessary, and that all lifestyle choices are of equal merit. Those are lies. Lies that are examined here daily and refuted, from what I gather. We have particularly bad schools here, so perhaps my opinion is exaggerated based on that, but I definitely see ps as “less than”.

An academic education can be obtained by myriad means, but that is not the primary function of the public school system, and they don’t do a particularly good job of it. Yes, I believe most children would be better off in the care of their own parents for those ten hours a day.

I can edit to ‘for those who think the public system is very bad for children’.
My point was to take it as a given, and address those with the thought, as I am wondering as to thoughts on the implications.

Obviously women with no husband shouldn’t be having children under that paradigm (or even at all in my opinion, but that’s irrelevant to the point.)

I’m just wondering because I see a lot of overlap of thoughts – those who believe homeschooling is by far the right way, seem to believe that all children would be better if educated by their parents instead of the public system, and also seem to overlap with the idea that all women want nothing more than to be mothers.
And while I think an interested devoted mother can teach a lot of kids better than the public system, I think the pool of mothers who could do that well are much smaller than the pool of even mothers with husbands able to provide.

I’m not talking about bastard children being avoided, but about those women not having children at all, even if/after landing a man.
Or basically, I would ask, would you encourage more women to simply not pursue motherhood, since you’re demanding a lot more out of motherhood than many women put into it, and (I think) more than a decent percentage of otherwise-potential-mothers would have the ability to put into it.

“Saint Velvet says:
An academic education can be obtained by myriad means, but that is not the primary function of the public school system, and they don’t do a particularly good job of it. Yes, I believe most children would be better off in the care of their own parents for those ten hours a day.”

I entirely agree with your assessment of the public education system, but I think you are judging the option of being with the child’s parents on the best of parents (currently a large portion of those self-selecting to homeschool) rather than looking at ALL parents.

I have spent a number of years working with children, while I have met some spectacular parents, I have also met a lot of terrible ones. I have met plenty of women with husbands who just aren’t actually engaged in the day-to-day drudgery of having a child.
While my opinion of the public education system is very low, I’ve met a lot of children who would still be better off there than ‘learning’ at home with their mother. And while I’d argue those women just shouldn’t have children, women not having children seems to be a verboten view in the same far-right crowd that advocates homeschooling.

While homeschooling is not a panacea, it can in many situations offer a much greater range of educational experience than overcrowded public school classrooms. Current Western public schools (even magnet schools) are wedded to an archaic Prussian model from the mid-1800s that focuses on class discipline and order above the child’s imagination, critical thinking, questioning current authoritative knowledge, and stretching boundaries. This is especially lacking in in many schools’ STEM areas where these talents are mosts critical. The lack of critical thinkers (e.g. STEM field members) who are willing to go into public education is a bell-weather for the environment of teacher-student engagement, and it is not often related to salaries (which are .

To dismiss homeschooling and self-discovered learning, the means by which most of our scientists, engineers, and professionals before 1875 were educated (prior to their university and college attendance–if any), is narrow-minded and rather bigoted, at best.

Keoni and Carnivore – thank you. I can’t take that much credit for choosing family over career. I never really valued the benefits of my “career” all that much. I naturally prefer family life and am basically a homebody.

As for my son, he already prefers male company, but I do not feel replaced. Sometimes I do wish he were small again and cuddly – I very much wanted another baby – but this is the natural way of things, and I am very close to him. I did and do my part, and he needs his father and his uncles and grandfathers to show him how to be a man. We still spend a lot of time together.

As for the homeschooling debate, I think homeschooling can be a very good thing if you have competent and disciplined parents. As a librarian I worked with kids from public, private, and home schooling environments, and the homeschoolers were by far the most intellectually curious, well behaved, and helpful. There is probably a selection bias at work here, but many of the public school kids got worldly and jaded far earlier and were not very interested in checking out or reading books they weren’t assigned. I thought about homeschooling my son (he goes to Catholic school), but he is so social, he NEEDS to be around other people so much and, as an only child doesn’t have siblings to provide that for him. I felt I’d be spending all my time arranging social opportunities for him, so school was a better option for us.

And while I’d argue those women just shouldn’t have children, women not having children seems to be a verboten view in the same far-right crowd that advocates homeschooling.

As a Catholic, it is a source of intellectual conflict, but I leave it to this – marriage is a vocation, fertility is a gift, children are a blessing (in theory) to the Church (community). I would say that encouraging young women to approach their life’s work as a vocation (be it marriage and children, joining a convent, or dedicating themselves to scientific research, etc) and returning to the prioritization that was vacated by feminism, particularly part b, is where the “realistic” education you mentioned and religiosity merge, and why home schooled or classically/religiously educated children in traditional settings are likely where such corrected understanding will occur.

Short version : I do not believe all women should become mothers. I do not believe all families should home-school, nor should families necessarily home-school exclusively. It’s not about isolation, it’s about establishing right priorities.

The quality/quantity argument is lame. Love is demonstrated by prioritization. If I chose to spend the better part of my time with another man, my husband would doubt the veracity of my commitment, no matter how terrific I was when I deigned to honor him with my presence. It’s no different with children, it doesn’t play.

The idea that girls must be go to school and be successful to validate parents is VERY deeply entrenched. This is a trillion $$$$$ bubble. My wife had a conservative (modest) upbringing, always pushed to succeed. When she told her parents we were engaged her senior year in college they were not happy. They (mostly dad, but mom always worked) tried to convince her that she should go on to law school or be a doctor like her best friend. Her college was all paid for by scholarships. I knew better than to ask for permission to marry.

After they realized it was going to happen they never mentioned it again and have been good inlaws. My wife stayed home after the kids were born and went back to work now that they are in school. It is interesting that many of her female classmates are lawyers, putting off marriage and whatnot and don’t seem very happy. Oh, and no grandbabbies for mom dad to play with either for the parents. I wonder if their generation has any regrets or if the truth of the matter is too ugly.

I’ll co-sign Grerps acknowledgement that the constitution of the kid(s) in question needs to be considered. I’m wrestling (literally) with a 6 year old this year who would rather be at school. His sisters are “boring – all they want to do is read”.

“Introduce their daughters to single men in their 30s who are past the poverty-and-debt idiocy that now characterizes the immediate post-college years. Tell the daughters that they will be living with their parents until they choose a husband, and remind them how lucky they actually are to be able to skip the poverty and debt just by marrying someone who already made it through. Show them how much better off they are for turning down a ‘career.’ If the girls MUST attend college, they should choose a college in their hometown and live at home while attending, keeping them out of the hookup scene. However, it’s best if they don’t go at all and don’t get the idea of a career in their heads.”

Anti feminist parents can “tell” their daughter any darn thing they like, but making it stick is another matter. An 18 year old woman can do whatever she likes, without her parents’ permission, and even in the face of their opposition, as long as she can swing it financially. Maybe she won’t be able to go to a big shot, four year college (but with work study and student loans and scholarships and financial aid and so on, even that is not always the case), but she can sure as hell move out, move in with another woman or couple of women, get a job, probably attend a junior college or cheaper, State school, and tell her parents what they can do with their orders. Even if she can’t swing that, she can simply run away and live marginally, for example, as a worker in the commercial sex industry.

This is the same ole, same ole. The “patiarchy” by agreement” or undefined and not really viable “patriarchy by subculture.” Young women “get the idea of a career in their heads” from a thousand differents sources….official, such as direct government propaganda, quasi official, such as in schools, and private, including virtually every facet of the media (TV, movies, newspapers, magazines, music, the internet, etc). Even a home schooled girl hears the clearly expressed societal preference that she get a “career” from mulitiple, virtually unstoppable sources. Unless one is part of a strong, viable, truly insular subculture, like the Amish or Orthodox Jews, in which the flow of information is carefully controlled AND there is a strong push to get married young given not only by parents but by a whole community, then the idea a young woman can simply be “told” not to go to college and/or have a career is a fantasy. Most traditional Christians, whether Catholic or Protestant or something else, come nowhere near to meeting the two criteria mentioned above. They have no monopoly or near monopoly as the source of info for their daughters and they are not part of a tight enough subculture as to provide meaningful community reinforcement of the parents’ message. Their daughters are getting the careerist, feminist message from society at large, and the group their parents supposedly belong to is not nearly insular or “separate” enough (as the Amish say) to matter.

Back in the day, like in my aunt’s era, unmarried women live at home, with ther parents. This was the societal norm, as well her parents’ expectation. And there was no countervailing feminist message of pseudo liberation glamorizing and valorizing career over marriage and motherhood. This was long before “That Girl,” never mind “Mary Tyler Moore,” much less “Murphy Brown” or “Sex in the City.” So, yeah, women like my aunt lived at home her whole life, because they did not get married. My aunt worked but didn’t move out even though she could have, and her social life, even into her thirties and forties, was controlled to a great extent by her parents. She could not bring men over to sleep with her. She had to sneak around, like a teenager, to have sex with her boyfriend. What woman in her young twenties today is going to agree to live like that, when (a) she doesn’t have to financially, (b) it is not the societal norm, and (c) every source of information except her parents is “telling” her not to?

“It’s really sad how many of the supposedly conservative parents succumb to the kind of thinking Escoffier is talking about, where their daughter must go to Harvard and fake a career, just to meet a Harvard man. Sadly, most of them accept the conventional UMC values deep down and don’t even think of solutions that are truly antifeminist. If they call themselves Christian, it just means they feel like they need the help of religion to achieve conventional success.”

Harvard, for most people, really has nothing to do with it. Most people in the UMC, and above, actually do have “conventional UMC values,” and thus are not even motivated to provide a different set of expectations to their daughters. And most Harvard students come from the UMC or above. Rather, most traditional Christians are simply middle class, or even lower on the totem poll, and the issue is not whether their daughter will go to Harvard or not, but whether she will leave home at age eighteen, or thereabout, and get a job at supermarket and go to community college or take off for Vegas or LA and end up working as an “escort” or whatever. Her parents and, perhaps, her pastor, will be telling to stay at home, but the government and the media will be telling the opposite. Why would she listen to her parents, under these circumstance?

Also, as a separate matter, I question just how many successful men in their thirties are really looking for a circa 18 year old, high school educated only woman to marry. Successful men may very well want younger, hot wives. But do they really want women fresh out of high school, with whom they have nothing in common and who might very well actually be an embarrasment to them in their social and business lives, to be their wives? The “trophy wife” is kind of a fake paradign anyway, except perhaps for middle aged guys who have at least tens of millions of dollars. I would think that, even among those who consciously want younger wives, most succesful men in their thirties probably want a woman age 25 or so at the youngest, and want a woman who is going to fit into their business environment and social lifestyle. An uneducated woman of age eighteen from a traditional Christian family is hardly likely to fit the bill.

Once again, I don’t see the solution coming from the isolated actions of individual trad cons. Society as a whole must be reformed. At least the official and quasi official sources of information must be won back from the feminists. An, at a minimum, alternate sources of information must be available in the popular media. (As an aside, there was a recent internet story about the loss of fertility in women in their thirties and forties…many such women, including the author, were simply unaware of this basic, biological fact…in the comments, many folks tried to argue that the feminists systematically suppress this informantion, and despite all the gnashing of teeth by some of the other posters, I think that is correct. That is the kind of thing that must be changed.)

The English speaking world developed its female pedestalizing notions, imho, to strengthen family formation at a time of great demographic stress and group danger. Females were not put up on the pedestal until the time of the prolonged and bloody wars with France/Napolean roughly 1760 to 1815. The survival of their nation and their Protestant religion seemed to be in doubt..
A necessary step to improve the health of families is to do everything possible to make the average man seem sexually attractive, or at least tolerable, to the type of woman he is likely to be paired off with. Some of the basics are to herd the women into marriages at a young age with older guys who had been alpha-ed up in various ways and to give the husband meaningful legal rights. This is what a society must do, in one form or another, if it wants to have stable families for the non-rich.
It is quite true that Victorian ideals did not much appear outside the English speaking world of that era but but consider that Victorian, post 1815 Britain rapidly dominated the whole globe while their American cousins were doing the same to the N. American continent.
With a sex in the city approach to family, that would never have happened.

As a philosophical point, IMO the majority of people do not have “careers”, they have “jobs”. Maybe a series of “jobs” that begin, continue for a while, then end.

Here’s one definition of “career” vs. “job” I heard years ago:

A career is something that you would do even if no one paid you to do it.
A job is something you would not do, but it’s worth the money.

It’s the old “live to work” vs. “work to live” dichotomy. I have known a few, very few, women who genuinely were career women. Most were people with jobs. If they had not been taught they were special snowflakes who could “have it all”, then changing jobs would not bother them, even if they were changing from that oh-so-important cube farm position as junior underassistant to mid-level management, to the position of house manager.

What is really interesting I have learned that women are motivated in two ways that over lap. Woman are in constant competiton for status with other women and hypergamy. All guided by a childish selfishness. What the competition is is anybody’s guess from sexiest,nicest,smartest,prettiest,best mother,most virtuous what ever it doesn’t matter if she is those things just that she is perceived as such. What they think gives them status is easily adjusted by social movement of the herd. (Can you imagine a womans mind constantly running from here and there trying to keep up with popularity trends. Think of the money wasted on boob jobs, face lifts, purses, clothes and shoes.) This latest thing from dalrock here student loans and years off of a life and the sacrifice of children and a beta chump to show her credentials and status.

From Rum
“A necessary step to improve the health of families is to do everything possible to make the average man seem sexually attractive, or at least tolerable, to the type of woman he is likely to be paired off with.”

I agree with this. How we get there is where the arguement is. What is really neat is women are telling the world what will get them there. In fact it is becoming more common for women to scream out load what they fear and makes them miserable. That misery is good because from that state of being the herd can be directed to any where perceived to be a source of pleasure and relief from misery. One direction is the removal of the laws of misandry. Which is more important as a man than living the delusion of happily married with misandry. .

“Can we control for choice? I’d suspect that the type of woman who is interested in staying home with her kids is the type of mother who is likely to assist outcomes even if she weren’t at home.”

…Yes we can!
Your comment describes the problem of self-selection which plagues many early SAHM vs. working mother studies. And it’s certainly true: some mothers self-select into either working or becoming SAHMs as best suits their (or their children’s) respective needs and skills. The Social Pathologist had a good blog post on this a while back. However, even after controlling for a mothers’ skills and characteristics, the finding for the majority of women (and their children) still holds. Consider that…
– Even after controlling for demographics reflecting mothers’ pre-birth work experience, education, and career interests, children of SAHMs suffer fewer negative outcomes/perform better than working mothers.
– Looking at just working women and their time on maternity leave, the length of time their children are under their own care (vs. daycare) is correlated with later positive outcomes.
– Again looking at just working women (where mothers again serve as their own control), such children suffer from greater cortisol (stress hormone) on days they’re in day care vs. less cortisol on the days the children are home with their mothers.
It’s no longer remarkable that the statistics show SAHMs tend to produce children with better social outcomes, on average after controlling for other factors. (Note this isn’t saying that ALL children are better off with SAHMs. Also, there are things parents can do that help mitigate the negative outcomes). What’s remarkable is that the MSM is so slow to acknowledge the general facts. I suspect it’s because the MSM is itself populated by working women who are themselves piqued by the findings. Second, these findings completely rub against the grain of “women’s rights” uber alles.

Aurini –I was simply pointing out that society is broken; once it’s broken, there’s no sense in investing. I would like to live in an age full of honest men and women, and no government, but I don’t; so I’m not going to play the game as if I were.

my apologies for misinterpreting yr comment re “jobless bums”

i’m a bit sensitive about folks (bennett et al) demeaning unemployed men after spending 50 years gleefully jettisoning them from the workplace

appreciate you setting me straight on yr position; best of luck w/yr work

RL – Looks like a perfectly fins symbol to me. It looks like a Femi-Nazi Swastika to me. If anything, the insult here is directed toward the Nazi’s when you conflate them with feminists

whoa instead of turkey day it’s mea culpa day lol

again, i wish to apologize to any nazis, past or present, for associating them with feminists

we fought a war with germany, only to be enslaved by our own females and their lapdogs

2 ruddyturnstone
=======================
Also, as a separate matter, I question just how many successful men in their thirties are really looking for a circa 18 year old, high school educated only woman to marry. Successful men may very well want younger, hot wives. But do they really want women fresh out of high school, with whom they have nothing in common and who might very well actually be an embarrasment to them in their social and business lives, to be their wives?
=======================
If a successful guy marries 18 year old girl, it doesn’t mean that the girl cannot go to college after she is married. Also I find it interesting that a 30 year old aging ex slut with a fluffy HR degree is not “embarrassing” but a young and hot girl attending college is somehow “embarrassing”

2 Rum
==================
The English speaking world developed its female pedestalizing notions, imho, to strengthen family formation at a time of great demographic stress and group danger. Females were not put up on the pedestal until the time of the prolonged and bloody wars with France/Napolean roughly 1760 to 1815. The survival of their nation and their Protestant religion seemed to be in doubt..
===================

Female pedestalization doesn’t strengthen family formation. Now most stable family structures are in countries where females are not on a pedestal

Well done, woman! You have demonstrated your essence once more. When you cannot argue successfully with logic and prove your points, go for the name-calling, and add in the ‘they’re being mean to me!’ meme. After all, reason is terribly unfair to use against a female, right?

Home-schooled children consistently outperform their public (or private) schooled counterparts, that is fact. One can point out that not everyone has the capability or drive needed to give their children that extra edge without calling others nasty.

I have no intent to continue baiting Chels into further hysteria, I do have to clarify something: I am not encouraging her to maintain her birth control simply because she intends to send her kids to public school…but rather because she has stated in the past that she intends to have kids and still keep her full time career.

In other words, public schools and after school day care or baby sitters will be raising her kids while she continues to focus on her career success (to afford the lifestyle of materialistic consumerism)…the typical feminist archetype. I believe you shouldn’t have kids if you don’t intend to raise them. Dropping them off first thing in the morning at school, than picking them up from daycare in the evening 5 days a week is not raising your kids. Now, if a family experiences severe financial difficulties that necessitate such a situation to survive, I got no criticism for that. But the families for which it is simply a lifestyle choice? These are the folks for which children are nothing more than checkpoints on the bucket list of life achievements. They are but accessories, like the pets and white picket fence. People like that shouldn’t have kids.

Homeschooling is not for everyone.

My opposition is against the public school system, it’s compulsory nature, and the way in which it inculcates secular, collectivist ideology into children. Not against schooling per say, just the current brainwashing system and the law used to enforce all kids to attend it unless their parents homeschool or pony up big money for a private school education.

In short, much of our ills of our declining civilization can be traced directly to the curriculum and attitudes inculcated into the masses by the public education system.

Any parent reading this with young children, MUST read the following two books before they make a fully informed decision about whether or not they should enroll their children in public schools.

The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto

and

The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America by Charlotte Iserbyt

Google them, you can find free versions of these seminal indictments of the public schooling system at their websites.

You really captured how I feel about my career. I went to college and law school with the intent of becoming a lawyer. I had never had a full time job until I graduated and I was truly shocked when I realized I had to go to work EVERY DAY ALL DAY!

What kind of idiots are we raising in this country? Don’t these kids get a taste of manual labor in their teens, before the college degrees and all that? You have to do those jobs all day, every day, at least til summer vacation ends and it’s time to go back to school. And don’t they have fathers around to observe, serious men who get up at dawn and go to work, and don’t come home til dinner?

Oh, wait… I guess little princess DIDN’T do manual labor as a teen. Never raked a leaf, never flipped a burger, nothing. And probably her Dad was banished by the anti-“family” court, so she never had a chance to observe his work habits. No wonder she’s surprised.

But wait… didn’t she have to go to school every day, all day? Was she cutting classes and partying instead? Did she think she could do this as an adult? Did she get her idea of the adult world from sitcoms, where people have an absurdly unrealistic amount of free time?

If you want to put your own kids into the anti-Christian, anti-Western, anti-American, anti-freedom, anti-family, anti-male, anti-heterosexual, anti-white racist tax funded socialist indoctrination / treason centers, feel free to do so. Be warned, however, that the curriculum is not only ideologically biased but intentionally dumbed down for purposes of social control, so even if you’ve drunk the ideological koolaid, you might be worried about their mathematical and literary incompetence.

“If a successful guy marries 18 year old girl, it doesn’t mean that the girl cannot go to college after she is married.”

No, it doesn’t. But that doesn’t really argue against my contention, which was that a successful thirty something man probably isn’t looking for an eighteen year old, HS graduate only woman to marry.

“Also I find it interesting that a 30 year old aging ex slut with a fluffy HR degree is not ’embarrassing’ but a young and hot girl attending college is somehow ’embarrassing.'”

Again, are you arguing “ought” or “is?” A successful man in his thirties, an executive or professional, probably does prefer a thirty year old, college graduate, psuedo professional with an HR degree to an 18 year old, when it comes to marriage. He probably feels he needs a woman he can bring to parties and work functions who is seen as a proper “match” for him. Not a woman who people are going to snicker at behind his back on the grounds of “cradle robbing.”

Also, the poster I was responding was specifically arguing that a young woman should not go to colleg at all. Presumably, after marrying young, she was to have babies and be a SAHM. He was not saying that a young woman should get married and then go to college.

“It’s no longer remarkable that the statistics show SAHMs tend to produce children with better social outcomes, on average after controlling for other factors. (Note this isn’t saying that ALL children are better off with SAHMs. Also, there are things parents can do that help mitigate the negative outcomes). What’s remarkable is that the MSM is so slow to acknowledge the general facts. I suspect it’s because the MSM is itself populated by working women who are themselves piqued by the findings. Second, these findings completely rub against the grain of ‘women’s rights’ uber alles.”

“You really captured how I feel about my career. I went to college and law school with the intent of becoming a lawyer. I had never had a full time job until I graduated and I was truly shocked when I realized I had to go to work EVERY DAY ALL DAY!”

Just two more examples, along with the example of women actually, really, and truly not knowing that their fertility will drastically decline in their thirties and drop to near aero when they hit forty.

Being a SAHM is probably better for a woman’s children than not. Jobs and careers are actually, for most people, including, if not especially, most women, not exciting or glamorous, but are difficult slogs. A woman can’t really “wait” to have kids until any old age she feels like. All of these simple and unobjectionable truths, and others like them, are somehow not getting out there to women. None of them are evil patriarchal lies. None of them are matters of mere opinion. They are the basic facts of life, childbirthing, and childraising for women.

I contend that the feminsts, with their near monopoly over official and semi official sources of information, and their almost total dominance of the media, have actively worked to suppress these truths. That’s why I think a big part of our efforts should be directed towards wresting control of these info outlets from the feminsts.

2 ruddyturnstune
====================
Again, are you arguing “ought” or “is?” A successful man in his thirties, an executive or professional, probably does prefer a thirty year old, college graduate, psuedo professional with an HR degree to an 18 year old, when it comes to marriage
====================

So there is the problem I was talking about. Men create demand for 30 years old ex-sluts, so the market creates supply of them. Historically men were not interested in older sluts, so supply of sluts was very limited. Men are creating dysfunctional SMP. So in order to fix the SMP men need to be shamed and be told to man up (stop marrying ex-sluts)

Good post, and you’ve hit on a very important point. Women pursue full-time careers because they believe it is high-status to do so. But there’s hope: you can get women to become m them that its high-status to do so(this was the case for most of human history).

The damage this attitude does and the way this is going to unravel is not going to be among the upper middle class where the educated stay at home mother is a status marker (and an obscene one too, if one recalls the deadly sins, gluttony, which is more than just eatting it is hoarding resources, pride and sloth, wasting an education) but among all the middle class women that are trying to keep up with them.

It is not lost among the generaton Y and to a lesser extent X that educated (and I use that term loosely) come with a huge price tag.

A woman with a college degree is not a bonus, its a huge negative (which is why its a status marker, “look at all the money I can afford to waste”). Women are going to college more and coming out with 50-100 thousand in student loan debt and that’s an underestimate.

On a ten year repayment plan they have to pay $1000 or more a month. On a twenty around $700, on a thirty $500. This assumes they don’t rack up another 60 grand in graduate school.

What sane man would sign up for that?

50 years ago a middle class woman could go to college and get her Mrs. degree (which this really is just a prolonged form of that) without going into debt. It made sense then, the college population was predominately male, with men that had a higher probability to providing a higher average standard of living then their counterparts.

Now it really is going to lead to a large cadre of spinsters.

While there may or may not be a marriage strike that is visible yet, I can tell you from the “ground” that the generation Y men have a significantly different view on marriage than Xers or the locusts that came before them and this is going to play out in the next twenty years in a way that is going to make feminists and social conservatives panic and pee their collect pants.

“Some of the basics are to herd the women into marriages at a young age with older guys who had been alpha-ed up in various ways and to give the husband meaningful legal rights. This is what a society must do, in one form or another, if it wants to have stable families for the non-rich.”

Yes, but a key component seems to be “young woman with older, established man”. Unfortunately, this means that a substantial portion – if not the majority – of Millenial women – just now entering their 30s – will have no husband.

“What kind of idiots are we raising in this country? Don’t these kids get a taste of manual labor in their teens, before the college degrees and all that? You have to do those jobs all day, every day, at least til summer vacation ends and it’s time to go back to school. And don’t they have fathers around to observe, serious men who get up at dawn and go to work, and don’t come home til dinner?”

I think you’re on the wrong tack here. Its not about role-modeling or past experience, but rather, motivation. Men are motivated by the need for sex and love from a woman, and if those things aren’t tied to work, men will not work. Or when they do work, they will do something that is attractive to women but not necessarily beneficial to society, such as any of the various permutations of “personal trainer”.

On the plus side,if by some magic women left the workforce and needed to be supported, you’d find that all these loser Millenial young men would suddenly start working very hard. men’s behavior is highly malleable – they will do anything as long as it gets them the right to sex and a partnership.

Women, on the other hand, can’t raise their sexual value through work. This is why they so rarely work very important jobs. If slaving away as a doctor or engineer won’t get them a more attractive man as their mate, they figure what’s the point? One of the key failings of feminist ideology fails to recognize this.

“So there is the problem I was talking about. Men create demand for 30 years old ex-sluts, so the market creates supply of them. Historically men were not interested in older sluts, so supply of sluts was very limited. Men are creating dysfunctional SMP. So in order to fix the SMP men need to be shamed and be told to man up (stop marrying ex-sluts)”

I don’t like talk of “manning up” or “shaming” men, but, yeah, marriage strike! And that is what is happening. More and more, men ARE refusing to marry women age thirty and up. Things ARE changing, beneath the surface.

“While there may or may not be a marriage strike that is visible yet, I can tell you from the ‘ground’ that the generation Y men have a significantly different view on marriage than Xers or the locusts that came before them and this is going to play out in the next twenty years in a way that is going to make feminists and social conservatives panic and pee their collect pants.”

Don’t much like the talk of “Generation” this or that either, or the broad brush notion of a generation of “locusts,” but, again, yeah, marriage strike! Maybe not consciously, but it’s here already. As of right now, a smaller per centage of the population is married than since records were kept. Same with the percentage that has ever been married. And, no, it is not merely the effect of later marriage. The per centage of married or ever married for EVERY AGE cohort of women is now lower than it has ever been. Not just twenty somethings or thirty somethings. Women in their forties are less likely to be married or to have ever been married than ever before. And the same with women in their fifties, and so on. If it were merely a case of later age of marriage, that would not be the case. The married and ever married per centages would “catch up” to thier historical levels for the older age cohorts of women if that were the case. But they are not.

Women still desperately seek marriage, even if they “wait” to age thirty or so to start seeking it. Men, more and more, are eschewing marriage, particularly with these older women. They are refusing to marry and/or they are not living the kinds of lives that make them attractive putative husbands for women. Why work and struggle and save in order to be husband material, if marriage is a shit deal for men? When the women are done pretending to have careers, more and more of them are finding out that men don’t want to bail them out with marriage and SAHM status.

And don’t they have fathers around to observe, serious men who get up at dawn and go to work, and don’t come home til dinner

Hey, isn’t this the description of the antagonist in most family movies for the past couple of decades? The evil businessman who is never there for his kid? The father who needs to be taught a lesson about how work isn’t important?

So there is the problem I was talking about. Men create demand for 30 years old ex-sluts, so the market creates supply of them. Historically men were not interested in older sluts, so supply of sluts was very limited. Men are creating dysfunctional SMP. So in order to fix the SMP men need to be shamed and be told to man up (stop marrying ex-sluts)

I think you might be on to something here, but I think shame is the wrong concept. Ridicule would be more effective, even very small doses of it would neutralize the imagined nobility of marrying a woman who “made some mistakes”. This is especially true if the mistakes are manifested in the form of another man’s crotch spawn.

I think you are pushing for too large an age gap though. Waiting until a man has turned 30 strikes me as waiting until the lottery tickets are scratched to decide to buy one. A woman around 20 marrying a 24-25 year old man is a better match in my opinion (but then I may be biased by my the respective ages of my wife and me when we married). This way the woman would still have the benefit from marrying at her peak MMV, would be able to have a better sense of the man’s ambition, talent, and personality, and would avoid the damage of the carousel. The feminists of course will try to shame the man for marrying younger even this little bit, but I know from experience that the obvious benefits outweigh any shaming one might endure. If there were some ridicule of white knights marrying ex party girls, this would of course help even more.

50 years ago a middle class woman could go to college and get her Mrs. degree (which this really is just a prolonged form of that) without going into debt. It made sense then, the college population was predominately male, with men that had a higher probability to providing a higher average standard of living then their counterparts.

Now it really is going to lead to a large cadre of spinsters.

Funny, I was framing this the same way today when discussing it with my wife. The feminist merit badge career is both an extension of and an attempt to rebel against the Mrs. degree. I think future SAHMs getting degrees isn’t a bad idea so long as it is done in a smart way. Going to the best status signaling school doesn’t make much sense unless you are independently wealthy. Finding a reasonably priced state school (if you can find one) makes much more sense. Also, there is a strange assumption that marriage can’t come before college graduation. My wife had completed about one semester when we married, and we put her through the rest of her BA without borrowing any money, and this was before I made much at all. She worked, and we didn’t have the extra costs of student housing and meal plans.

While there may or may not be a marriage strike that is visible yet, I can tell you from the “ground” that the generation Y men have a significantly different view on marriage than Xers or the locusts that came before them and this is going to play out in the next twenty years in a way that is going to make feminists and social conservatives panic and pee their collect pants.

I would be more surprised if something wasn’t brewing than if it is. If what you are saying is correct however, it strikes me that someone must have measured this via survey. Have you seen any data on this?

A woman around 20 marrying a 24-25 year old man is a better match in my opinion

This.

I don’t agree that women shouldn’t be educated beyond high school, I mean you want her to be able to carry on a conversation and answer an email in complete sentences, What should be avoided is a clueless young woman with financial baggage – unless she is studying to be a doctor, no debt is necessary. Her creativity in acquiring her education, assuming her parents did not pay for it, speaks volumes. Plus, busy girls have less time for carnival antics.

Ridiculing white knights marrying ex carousel riders would certainly make for some interesting public dialog. The sex-positive feminists would go ballistic; I dunno what form it would take, maybe more variations on the slutwalks? More than a few churches would pound the podium over that, as well; there seems to be more than a little emotional investment on the SoCon side in pushing men to play Cap’n Save a Ho’, and ridiculing that would definitely pinch them where it hurts. I can see the Bill Bennet rant now…

I like this idea. It has the useful property of forcing out into the open exactly what men are being pushed to do, clarifying some issues nicely.

========================
I think you might be on to something here, but I think shame is the wrong concept. Ridicule would be more effective, even very small doses of it would neutralize the imagined nobility of marrying a woman who “made some mistakes”. This is especially true if the mistakes are manifested in the form of another man’s crotch spawn.
========================

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Captains Save-a-Ho create more damage than feminists (feminists could not convince women to behave in a way that will surely prevent marriage to a worthy man), so I think manosphere should concentrate more on them

========================
I think you are pushing for too large an age gap though.
========================

I’m not pushing for any specific gap. As you know change is created on the margin. Men with most MMV affect the market much more than men with low MMV (nobody cares about losers’ preferences). So successful men in their 30s (doctors, lawyers, investment bankers etc) who are already “arrived” influence the market in a very big way. If women know that the successful guys go after virgins or near virgins in their 18-22, then it will affect the perception of women about what to do and what not to do in a very big way

========================
The feminists of course will try to shame the man for marrying younger even this little bit, but I know from experience that the obvious benefits outweigh any shaming one might endure. If there were some ridicule of white knights marrying ex party girls, this would of course help even more.
=======================

Why should a man care what feminists think? Some feminists want to exterminate men, so should men commit suicide? For example, If a young doctor was nerdy, poor and busy in his Med school, and “arrived” in his early 30s, why should he choose a 30-year old ex-slut, if he can go after 21 year old?

D:”I would be more surprised if something wasn’t brewing than if it is. If what you are saying is correct however, it strikes me that someone must have measured this via survey. Have you seen any data on this?”

There was a survey of professional MEN in their late 20s and 30s age bracket on their views on marriage in early 2000s (2003 I think). The results from memory:

22% said they would never marry
35% said they were very wary of marrying
43% said they intend to marry at some point

The whole concept of “high status” college education for women works like the following. We have Jane Schmoe in high school, who is told: Jane, you see guys around you? You can do a lot better if you go to a college, than find a work in a big prestigious firm in a big city. The big city is full of big, juicy alphas, and you will be able to choose among them because you will be “high status”.

But if Jane knows that the concepts described above doesn’t work, because alphas go for young girls, then she will want to marry soon, knowing that her prime time is running out

Saint VelvetI don’t agree that women shouldn’t be educated beyond high school, I mean you want her to be able to carry on a conversation and answer an email in complete sentences,

Heh heh. Do you have any idea how many college women can’t meet that standard?

What should be avoided is a clueless young woman with financial baggage – unless she is studying to be a doctor, no debt is necessary.

I’ve stated before that higher education is in a bubble. I think I have a new way to illustrate that, now that everyone finally agrees that the housing bubble wasn’t such a good idea.

How many men would be willing to marry a woman who had bought a house zero down 2 years ago, whose mortgage is now under water? Say she bought a McMansion in Bakersfield county or some other garden spot for $400K, and the most recent foreclosure auction in the neighborhood saw an identical house sell for $299,999. So she’s $100K underwater, can’t possibly hope to sell the place for what she owes, and let’s assume she can’t default. Is this marriage material? A woman with a non-productive asset that will drain money for the next 25 years?

That’s what marriage to a growing number of early 20’s women is like. The college degree in far too many majors has changed from being a productive asset with future value to a liability that cannot be gotten rid of except by paying it off. You can’t get rid of student loan debt by bankruptcy. You can only get rid of it by paying off. So sinking $50,000 into many “college degrees” is on a par with borrowing the money & buying lottery tickets with it.

People should think of college as an investment, not a speculation and not a sure thing. That means doing research into the job market – it won’t change that much in 4 to 6 years – and seeing what the payoff for that degree is. Does it make sense to sink $50,000 into a degree that will return $25,000 gross per year? Nope. The days when merely having the degree would get some kind of employment are over. Even though unemployment for “college degreed” is 5% or less right now, it is not uniform across degrees; “communications studies”, anthropology, ***** studies, etc. might not be as good a deal as anything medical, STEM, some business degrees (forget finance for a few more years, it’s glutted, but there’s always work for accountants). End of soapbox speech.

Her creativity in acquiring her education, assuming her parents did not pay for it, speaks volumes. Plus, busy girls have less time for carnival antics.

Even if her parents paid for it, if she spent her free time working at a job 20 hours/week, etc. it might be all right. Future time orientation and good impulse control, that is what matters I am becoming convinced.

I just can’t seem to get away from this blog, Dalrock. Well, after someone emailed me a link again, I just gave into temptation, and took a look.

This from Chels, who you may recall I castigated some time ago in a previous thread, saying that it was women like her who made it hard for decent women. You may recall I called her out on her pseudo Christian principles. Having sex with the boyfriend she says she will oneday marry, with nary a mention of a marriage soon.???. And she is twenty six.. ????

Sheesh this woman is far more damaging than any feminist. Do you know why? Because she is a feminist in sheep’s clothing.. Says she is not a feminist, but no plans for marriage anytime soon. Plans to work fulltime and let the state bring up her kids..Sticks up for men in her head… Indeed these are the most dangerous and insidious kinds of feminists..

Yet for some reason personal slurs from Chels, such as this are tolerated ..

“And you know, for a random stranger on the Internet, KG, you sure are too preoccupied with my own personal life and with the choices we make. Oh, I can guarantee at least 2 mini-Chels’ so I hope you go jump off a cliff, you ignorant asshole.”

Uncalled for diatribe against Keoni who made salient points without resorting to personal name calling. Keoni has HER number alright! 😉

I know one girl in a different country who was a 9 and dated an alpha in her early 20s for a couple of years and pushed him to marry her. He dumped her because he had too many choices and wasn’t ready to settle down. She complained that she lost a few years with him, then she found herself a well-off greater beta and married him. Know she has kids and happy in her marriage. In that country men with options are quite ruthless and they don’t like single moms, sluts or older women, so her calculated choice led her to a good and stable marriage. If she thought that she has 10 years until it’s good time to marry, then she would probably slut it up with random hot guys. So I propose a solution to the woes of modern US SMP. Men should be ruthless in their choices of mates and as “shallow” as possible

“No, it isn’t; the majority of the world’s children are educated in the public school system and they grow up just fine. ”

Fine according to whom? The “fine” people of the world are experiencing crises right now that were unknown and perhaps largely unexpected just a few decades ago. We’re in a proper mess at the moment, and examining the wrack and ruin that public education has wrought is one the big issues that needs addressing.

Chels, you are going along with life according to the CW way, and I can’t fault you too much for your SWPL attitude. Public school allows people who want to have kids but not really be parents the opportunity to collect more status symbols down the road. Once you have your own degree and credentials and career established, you can begin to collect Honor Student bumper stickers, soccer trophies, science fair honorable mention ribbons, and Nice Student of the Week certificates to show off to the other parents just how special your kids are (despite being non-parented in a proper and traditional manner).

KG, Grerp, Escoffier, and Carnivore, I’m in your camp. I attended college, worked (even taught in public school over which I could spill gallons of internet ink describing and deriding), and then, shortly before the arrival of our first daughter, I quit work to stay home with her. It’s the best and most fulfilling work I have ever done. I don’t regret college or working, because those experiences made me who I am; however, hindsight being perfect, I would have skipped college or at least just done a practical 2-year degree, or vocational school. I thought I needed college to be taken seriously and get a job and be fulfilled; it turns out that I only need to be taken seriously by the people whom I love, and being fulfilled means being loved by them. My husband and my family fill those requirements despite my degree. I never had a job (except for teaching) that really required a degree – it was only window-dressing and way to winnow out the chaff without specifically testing people for the intelligence necessary to type letters, file papers, and manage a timeline.

The job market is distorted in favor of people with degrees, for reasons that range from prohibitions against intelligence testing to affirmative action and ERA to just finding SOME REASON to justify the higher ed ethos. All through HS and college, I was told that I should finish that degree because employers aren’t going to be interested in you and you won’t make as much money if you don’t have at least a bachelor’s degree…as the damage wrought by so many well-intentioned lies.

but rather because she has stated in the past that she intends to have kids and still keep her full time career.

In other words, public schools and after school day care or baby sitters will be raising her kids while she continues to focus on her career success (to afford the lifestyle of materialistic consumerism)…the typical feminist archetype.

I’m going to try very hard to be as civil as I can possibly be because TC posters really bring out the worst in me, and my subsequent attitude is getting even on my nerves, and it’s not in my nature to resort to profanity despite how angry I am.

I was raised with a working mother, she was and still is very successful, and I never thought I was lacking a mother even though she did work a lot, and she was gone from about 8AM to 7-8PM starting from when I was old enough for grade 1 (she stayed home with us during our first year, and after that, she had a flexible job). However, I and my brother didn’t suffer, we didn’t feel like we were missing anything, and we have a very close relationship with her. She didn’t work because she wanted to, but rather because she wanted to give us an upper middle class standard of living, which she certainly accomplished. Would I have rather been poor and spend more time with mommy? Definitely not.

Similarly, the man that I’m with was raised the same way, and in his case, his mother worked even more, and he also didn’t suffer and has a fantastic relationship with his parents. We also feel incredibly fortunate to have been able to attend outstanding schools, and we were both in rigurous academic programs, so we don’t think we were brainwashed into anything (both of us took languages, sciences and math, where the opportunity for brainwashing is very little).

However, we’re from the same European country where every woman works, the majority of women have a postsecondary degree and SAHMs are incredibly rare, which definitely explains our own attitudes to this matter.

Nevertheless, with this being said, our own plan is for me to stay at home with the kids until they’re around 3-4 years old, and then have them go to school (we want a montessori school). However, if we can see that this is harming them, and they’re suffering, I have no problem to stop working, my family definitely comes first. We also think that I need a flexible job, one that doesn’t demand crazy hours so that I’m home by around 6-7 at the latest.

If this makes me a feminist, and it makes him a mangina, then so be it. We have our own plan, we have our own thoughts and opinions, and both of us want what’s best for our family, even though that means it’s not what’s best for your own family. Every family has different needs and you should be mature enough to at least acknowledge that.

I stayed home after my second child was born. I put my eldest into daycare for 10 months, when she was just shy of a year old, so I could take a job teaching. Turns out what I thought would be a long-term job only lasted a year due to budget cuts and some concerns over my inability to tow the party lion. I was pregnant with my second in the latter half of the school year and realized a few things. Foremost: I hated every second of every day that I was away from my baby. Putting her in daycare, in the care of strangers (even though well-meaning and kind enough) was anathema to my whole being. Beyond that concern came the practical concern that I was really only working to keep her in daycare. I wasn’t netting enough money at the end of any given month to make it truly worthwhile to work, and with another on the way and needing care while I worked, I would net nothing (and we might have been in the hole a few hundred dollars, even with my salary).

So I stayed home and did what my nature dictated. I breastfed. I read to them, played with them, gave them a safe and clean home, and made good food for them and my husband to eat when he arrived home after working to provide for our well being. Traditional? Absolutely. I would not have it any other way. And I don’t feel oppressed or distressed; in fact, it is the most liberating thing that has happened in my whole life.

I think shaming the guys who are marrying those women won’t work very well, because their own peer group won’t shame them. It’s the peer group that counts. Those guys couldn’t care less about what guys outside that group think.

It won’t matter that much in the next generation anyway, because of the massive college/graduate skew in favor of women, such that they are going to outnumber men quite substantially at those levels,and will either have to ditch hypergamy, raise children as single mothers, or forego it. That’s irrespective of what the fewer guys who are in that category are doing in terms of marrying, just because of the numbers game in terms of education demographics.

Beyond that concern came the practical concern that I was really only working to keep her in daycare. I wasn’t netting enough money at the end of any given month to make it truly worthwhile to work, and with another on the way and needing care while I worked, I would net nothing

Not taking a side here, but just pointing out that for UMCs, this isn’t really the case. They’re in a different category. For the lower rung UMCs, who rely on two incomes to fund a 300-500k total in major coastal metros, they may choose to keep working because the “net” is quite substantial, rather than losing 150-250k in income. For the higher rung UMCs, where the husband earns 500k+, the mothers will take time off from the career when the kids are young (or longer) because they have enough money on one income to live UMC lifestyle.

I’ve been blurking around the manosphere for a while now and thought I’d comment.

1) Wow–in general you guys have us women pegged to a tee!
2) A lot of the women I knew in college were pretty tepid about their ‘career/degree’ path. I think its mainly because they feel like they HAVE to do the whole college/career thing—–its one thing if you choose that path, but its totally different if you’re forced into it. Also its absolutely shameful for an UMC girl not to be an assertive, driven college student who likes to get a little wild on the weekends—but is still a ‘nice girl’ deep down.

“I would be more surprised if something wasn’t brewing than if it is. If what you are saying is correct however, it strikes me that someone must have measured this via survey. Have you seen any data on this?”

From what I”ve seen on facebook – I”m friends with virtually everyone in my graduating class – it seems people are sill pairing up.

“I think you might be on to something here, but I think shame is the wrong concept. Ridicule would be more effective, even very small doses of it would neutralize the imagined nobility of marrying a woman who “made some mistakes”. This is especially true if the mistakes are manifested in the form of another man’s crotch spawn.”

I don’t think you will need to ridicule or shame. I think most women will simply dump their husbands because of too-high expectations. There won’t need to be a marriage strike, marriage will self-destruct.

“It’s a side note, but what a depressing thought that an 18yo with 12 years of schooling isn’t expected to clear this bar.”
Well said. Twenty!.
I myself basically only had twelve years of schooling, (was accepted to college but dropped out) Got a job worked my way up very quickly. Earned good money. Saved it. Made astute real estate investment. All without a college degree. My husband and I are debt free thanks to my major contribution in the purchase of a house.
Of course now he is a very successful businessman and I look after the home side of things. I gave up my job (and got good super pay out) to have kids and stay at home.. This is what he wanted, and I was happy to comply.

ruddy: “Again, are you arguing “ought” or “is?” A successful man in his thirties, an executive or professional, probably does prefer a thirty year old, college graduate, psuedo professional with an HR degree to an 18 year old, when it comes to marriage. He probably feels he needs a woman he can bring to parties and work functions who is seen as a proper “match” for him. Not a woman who people are going to snicker at behind his back on the grounds of “cradle robbing.””

I guess the assumption was that we are talking avout a man who cares for his and his childrens interests more than the opinions of people who according to him have made unwise choices.

Madbiker: “I thought I needed college to be taken seriously and get a job and be fulfilled; it turns out that I only need to be taken seriously by the people whom I love, and being fulfilled means being loved by them.”

Very wise. But it is hard to get wise when surrounded by stupidity. Most of the time it is down to sheer luck arriving at that point.

Brendan: “Not taking a side here, but just pointing out that for UMCs, this isn’t really the case. They’re in a different category. For the lower rung UMCs, who rely on two incomes to fund a 300-500k total in major coastal metros, they may choose to keep working because the “net” is quite substantial, rather than losing 150-250k in income. For the higher rung UMCs, where the husband earns 500k+, the mothers will take time off from the career when the kids are young (or longer) because they have enough money on one income to live UMC lifestyle.”

Shit. Americans are rich. At least if this is 5 % of the population, as somebody defined the UMC. In Sweden those figures are for (far) less than 0,5 % of the population (i.e. 45 000 people).

“Who are the magazine distributed to?
The magazine is distributed to the 35 500 persons in the Sweden that have a declared income of 1.2 million SEK or more, and to the 6,000 persons who have a fortune over 5 million SEK.41 500 copies. Connoisseur Exclusive is distributed in December each year to 6,000 persons with a fortune of more than 5 million SEK and the 8500 persons with higher income. Age distribution is 20-70 years.15 000 copies.”

You’re right, Brendan, I’m not UMC by any means. We make it one less-than-six-figure salary in the most densely populated, highest taxed state.

@Twenty: “It’s a side note, but what a depressing thought that an 18yo with 12 years of schooling isn’t expected to clear this bar.”

I’ve taught high school, in both poor urban settings and in wealthy suburban regionals. I knew exactly three kids, out of the hundreds I’ve taught, who could clear this bar. One was a boy, homeschooled until his high school years. One was a girl who went to Catholic school until high school. Another was a boy who just seemed overall well-adjusted; he was bookish and quiet but passionate about certain subjects.

Teenage culture was a problem when I was in HS in the early 90s, at least I perceived a problem with it. Teen-dom is basically defined by being self-absorbed and notable for its lack of future-time orientation. How much of this is genetic can be debated, but I think there is a systematic infantilization of young adults happening in our schools. There is no expectation that they be responsible for anything: not behavior, not grades, not for development of any intellect or social graces. Teachers are supposed to do that, and when kids don’t measure up or fail to develop, it’s the teachers fault. I can say that there are some great and not so great teachers out there, but a teacher doesn’t carry the weight and authority that a parent/family unit does, period.

On top of the lack of expectations and constant excuse-making that schools and parents do, you have a fractured culture of “unity through diversity” which is as moronic as it sounds. Hegelian dialectics rule in school; what you see is not real or true because someone else might have a different perspective and you must always consider the perspectives and experiences of others before you even dare think about passing judgment or taking a stand on an issue. No wonder no one (girls/women and boys/men) know what they want any longer. Confusion and lack of ability to make a decision based on principle are long gone; men (and women) of principle are becoming harder to find, because principles cause you to see only your own way of doing things, and you hurt other peoples feelings with your firm stand on issues. (/partial sarcasm)

I am from a European Catholic country (you know, one of those who are screwing the euro). I don’t like to be specific because things you put on the Internet last forever and I was not very careful in the first days of the net so it’s not difficult to find out who I am (I mean with first and last names).

In addition, you have to take into account that people in my close circle are wandering these forums and I have told so much about my life. I mean: how many people belonging to my country, have lived in United States for one year and in Latin America for 11 years (I have repeated this once and again), were dumped by her girlfriend of six years, are 41 and are single? Well, if we start from the end, there are very few middle-age bachelors in my surroundings and there is no other person who has gone to Latin America for so long. These only data reduce the number to 1 in my surroundings.

I have tried to solve that by changing nicknames, but people always find out that I am the same person.

Besides that, I’m 41 and my country has changed radically the last thirty years. When I talk about my teenage years, I talk about a patriarchal society that does not exist anymore. Now, my country is one of the hedonistic countries in Europe so writing its name is not going to be useful.

“I guess the assumption was that we are talking about a man who cares for his and his childrens interests more than the opinions of people who according to him have made unwise choices.”

You are missing the point as well. The original poster said that parents should keep their HS graduate daughters at home, not let them go to college, and introduce to them to successful men in their thirties looking to get married. My point was that I don’t think that there actually ARE a great many successful men in their thirties looking to marry an eighteen year old woman, fresh out of high school. But, again, an “is” claim is being met with an “ought” response. I don’t think that there ARE many such men, your claim is that there SHOULD BE. Maybe so, but that doesn’t make them exist, nor does it validate the original’s poster’s advice to parents.

ruddy: You are right. I dont think that there are many successful men in their thirties who have understood that this might be a good idea and that the scorn of others is greatly outweighed by the positives for him and his children. But then again, if they would get this sales pitch from older people who know 18 YO girls wanting to get married young, at least a large minority would consider the option. 100 years ago bourgeoisie fathers would marry off their young daughters to slightly younger collegues who needed more time than them selves to become eligible for marriage (most often because they were not born to money).

Shit. Americans are rich. At least if this is 5 % of the population, as somebody defined the UMC. In Sweden those figures are for (far) less than 0,5 % of the population (i.e. 45 000 people).

It very much depends on where you live in the US. The “national income figures” are not that meaningful, because the geographic income disparities are huge. I live in a county where the population is 1.2m, and the median family income is 122k — almost 40% have family incomes over 150k (and I can tell you that quite a few of those are over 250k): see http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/demogrph/gendemo.htm#inc. If you compare that to the national income averages for the US, or to a non-coastal, non-blue county, you’re going to see huge disparities. That’s why I was speaking about coastal UMCs — upper middle class Americans who live in major coastal metros like DC, NYC, Boston, LA, SF Bay, etc. Very different from other places in the US and less than 5% of the overall national population, but these are the places where the UMCs congregate (in the US).

“Household income distribution
Bottom 10% Bottom 20% Bottom 25% Middle 33% Middle 20% Top 25% Top 20% Top 5% Top 1.5% Top 1%
$0 to $10,500 $0 to $18,500 $0 to $22,500 $30,000 to $62,500 $35,000 to $55,000 $77,500 and up $92,000 and up $167,000 and up $250,000 and up $350,000 and up”

But you are right. In places where the cost of living is higher and there are more rich people it is harder to enter the (relative as opposed to nominal) UMC. I guess the national top 1 % (1 million households?) puts you in the top 5 % in major coastal metros. Or are differences even bigger?

@Shit. Americans are rich. At least if this is 5 % of the population, as somebody defined the UMC. In Sweden those figures are for (far) less than 0,5 % of the population (i.e. 45 000 people).

When I worked as a teacher in USA, I earned twice as much as what I earned by working as a teacher in my country. But I couldn’t save anything in USA, while, in my country, my salary was enough to economically support myself and save.

It’s not about the amount in dollars you earn, but about the purchasing power, In USA, things are expensive and there is a whole set of expenses that don’t exist elsewhere. When I lived in USA, I used to say “These Americans have perfected the art of separating you from your dollar”.

You have to take into account public services. This year has been an annus horribilis for me regarding my health. I have had two very expensive surgeries and I have been put a very expensive titanium prothesis (not to mention all the medical treatments, rehabilitation, etc). This costed nothing at all to me (I pay government health care but it is a very reasonable amount and covers EVERYTHING).

I ended my college degree and my PhD without any debt, as 99% of the citizens of my country. Prices of college are cheap here, because government subsidizes most of higher education.

So it’s not what you earn in figures, but what you can do with the money you earn. Money is a means, not an end.

It’s a side note, but what a depressing thought that an 18yo with 12 years of schooling isn’t expected to clear this bar.

Of course I agree – my original statement was meant to be a bit tongue in cheek. Yes, that anyone is graduated from anything, or allowed to operate a motor vehicle, etc, without those basic skills is very depressing.

I guess the national top 1 % (1 million households?) puts you in the top 5 % in major coastal metros. Or are differences even bigger?

It’s bigger than that.

Nationally, a family income of 150k+ is ~3% of the population. In the richer coastal metro suburbs (Fairfax County is one example of that), 150k is around 31% of the population — ten times the national average. The county statistics don’t break it down in terms of who is in the top 1% of the county (probably would piss people off to see it, really), but it’s much more than 250k+. If you’re 250k+ (top ~1% nationally), you’re likely in the top 20-25% of the richer coastal suburbias.

“I would be more surprised if something wasn’t brewing than if it is. If what you are saying is correct however, it strikes me that someone must have measured this via survey. Have you seen any data on this?”

From what I”ve seen on facebook – I”m friends with virtually everyone in my graduating class – it seems people are sill pairing up.

I suppose your friends are mostly women. In this case you are right.
In fact the only system where a woman might not find a mate is monogamy. Women have been fighting it since dawn of times. And in contemporary west, monogamy is gone. You do not have to worry about your chances (when young).

Anonymous,
I don’t think there is a marriage strike. Spinsterhood is driven by delusional female choices based on hypergamy lubricated by feminism. At this time we have bluepill men with no understanding of there SMV and men contrary to feminist teachings even in a lawless world will naturally marry and take care of woman and his children. The laws of misandry are there to insure absolute zero responsibility to ensure there are no restrictions on hypergamy. Only guys that have been burned one way or another actually become MRA’s or become partial dose red pill guys that know something isn’t right and will stay single to avoid the hassle. But i don’t believe there is a mens strike or will be until there is an emoition alternative to a relationship with actual women, men are trained to a cultural norm of not pedistalizing women.(actaually treating women the way they the feminist claim women are being treated) The last way i see as maybe possible and workable in a day to day fashion taking into account the human needs and sexual desires would be a male birth control pill. Even a fairly nervous guy that has trouble standing up to a woman he is emotionally terrified of having the woman he “loves” disapprove of him or leave him would be able to control his fatherhood with out confrontation with the woman. That is where the actual power in day to day intimate relationships lies. As it stands now with women controling child birth there can be no male strike and involutary childless spinsterhood is just a concept that asshole greyghost has come up with. The next best option is to make as many PUA and players as possible.

There is a big difference between median and average income. New money, in the sense of high acheiving professionals not born into money, is dominating in Bromma and to a lesser extent Djursholm (high median) and old money is dominating in a few zip codes in central Stockholm plus Djursholm, Stocksund and Saltsjöbaden (high average).

But the difference between Bromma and the immigrant suburb Rinkeby is only 1 to 5.

Interesting. I suppose one would expect to see similar disparities, but it’s notable that the overall gap in Sweden is smaller, which one would also expect, I think.

In the US, the relevant point for this type of discussion is that it is maddeningly difficult to have a national conversation about incomes and who is in what class and so on because different parts of the country (different big cities, even) are hugely different, and the expectations/experiences of people are therefore hugely different. So what happens is that people draw conclusions from their own experiences (as is common), despite the fact that these don’t reflect large swathes of the country where things are very different.

Let’s imagine that aliens with their powerful mind control devices made top 50% of men in the US to have the following restrictions:
1. A man absolutely won’t marry a single mother
2. A man absolutely won’t marry a woman older than 25
3. A man will not marry a woman, before dating her for at least 2 years
4. A man will dump a woman immediately if she cheated on him
5. A man will not marry a woman is she was a slut at any point before, a man before marrying will go to a private investigator and will ask him to do a background check on her, if she was a slut, she is dumped.

What will happen in the sexual market place after those changes?
1) The cock carousel will shrink in size dramatically, women will start to hunt for husbands early and seriously
2) The number of sluts and the average partner count for women will go way down
3) Single motherhood will go down
4) STDs will go down
5) Divorce rate will go way down, after some years of marriage women will not be able to marry attractive guys
6) Damage to kids due to single motherhood, divorce and the string of boyfriends following the divorce will go way down

So as we can see the natural preference of men for younger, hotter and tighter women with no kids from other men and low partner count is not only good for men themselves and their children, but it’s also good for the society and the country. So if a man who wants to marry follows the restrictions outlined above he makes the current SMP a better place, and if he doesn’t follow them he makes the SMP worse. Men need to man up, and take responsibility for modern SMP

Brendan: What I find a bit sad is that if high earners only look at their peers a large percentage will feel that they are only doing OK or that they are even underacheivers.

I remember one friend in private banking talking aboutt he rich Swedish clients he would visit on the Costa del Sol who would jammer about not being invited to some parties or not being accepted into a certain golf club and so on. Many of them where self made men who had sold their company and left for tax reasons, but who missed the status and respect they had in their original pond.

Oh really? Female behavior was historically controlled in large part by male behavior. Before men with options refused to marry non-virgins or older women, that affected female behavior in a very big way

Wow, that’s my ex-wife. She had a great career, but once it became difficult (because she moved up the ladder), she stopped liking it and soon quit so we could start a family. The timing was good, and she insisted on staying home with the kids. Of course, she’d been told her whole life that motherhood was unfulfilling and demeaning, so she hated it.

Among the backdrop of guilt for being a mom, she tried a lot of things to make herself feel better. I was making a lot of money, so she did a lot of emotional spending. It didn’t help. I changed my work schedule to start at 4 AM so I could pick the kids up from school every day (and feed them and put them to bed). It didn’t help. Eventually, she started reading a bunch of books selling divorce. She ultimately decided that the kids and me were the problem, and that a divorce was the only way she could be happy. It didn’t help. She’s depressed and lonely, and in therapy now.

I feel bad for her… she was fed a load of crap her whole life, and now she’s paying the price – along with me and our kids.

“In 2010, he introduced a television show called “Hjernevask” (“Brainwash”) which contrasted cultural determinist models of human behavior (also referred to as the Standard social science model) with nature-nurture interactionist perspectives. Several of those who were interviewed for the show criticized the show publicly both before and after the airing, and this ignited a wide public discussion on the subject of nature versus nurture debate. Specially the question of gender, and what is referred to as the gender paradox (the fact that although Norwegian women are largely represented within the working stock, more so than most countries, the Norwegian job market remains highly segregated in terms of gender) has provoked controversy.”

2 TFH
====================
Your comments clearly show that a) you don’t have a good understanding of how women think, and b) you do not realize that women don’t grasp cause and effect very well for your ideas to work.
====================

2 TFH
====================
Among the many reasons your plan would not work :

i) As soon as women get the right to vote, they aggressively vote to change laws in their favor and strip men of rights. Women voting is not compatible with the values enshrined in the constitutions of the US, UK, Canada, etc.

ii) Women vote for what benefits only women, whereas men vote for what benefits all people.

For the above two reasons, democracy invariably devolves into a feminist police state. Sandy’s ‘ideas’ above ignore the fact that the entire legal/judicial structure is heavily biased against men, which, again, is an unavoidable outcome of democracy.
====================

So if a man wants to marry, and goes for younger chicks, how is he going to be punished by legal system (vs him going after older chicks)? How is the stuff you write related to what I wrote here?

In addition to the problems others have mentioned (most importantly the impracticality of it ince men are not the limiting factor in human mating and reproduction), Sandy, the long-term trend since centuries and beyond is for people to marry within their social stratum. Assortative mating based on class is not new, and it is mostly still the case today. Men of that class want to marry women of that class, and vice versa, by and large. And in order to be a woman of that class, a woman has to be very well educated, has to have had a career, and so on — these are class and status markers. A man chooses a woman like that because he is practicing assortative mating, as has been done since forever. The status markers of what it means to be a UMC woman would have to be changed, and men can’t do much about that — that’s in the hands of women and their parents.

I haven’t read the entire discussion today, but I think sandy does have a basic point. There is an opportunity for men to make better choices on the margin which would both be to their own advantage and also send a signal to women. I don’t see anything to disagree with there.

DalrockThere is an opportunity for men to make better choices on the margin which would both be to their own advantage and also send a signal to women.

Only if men are able to reliably determine good women from bad ones. One predictor of future tendency to cheat or divorce (both bad behaviors) is “number of sexual partners woman had prior to marriage”. However, that is the one topic women are most likely to lie about…and therefore a key piece of data that men need will be deliberately withheld from them by women. Heck, some women even coach other women on how to be better at lying to beta men.

So women as a group are, by their actions, making it more difficult for men to make better choices. If women would shame and exclude high-partner count women, rather than help them pretend to be low partner count, then some women would not be haaapy, but most would benefit.

I admit that the education that I got was at the behest of my parents — their desire for prestige, for my “success” by their definitions, and all of the “power girl” images that you write about. I did that work for less than a year before moving on to the work that I’m passionate about.

I discovered this work before I was married, I wish I would have pursued it sooner without my parent’s influence, and ultimately, I continue this work while also being a wife and mother.

I am thankful, too, for one aspect of feminism — the real freedom to choose what we want for ourselves, for men and women.

While my husband does work, his average work day is 5 hours of work (1-2 for the business, the remainder for his own writing, and/or his contract work). The next 7 hours he is a stay-at-home dad.

The first five hours of my day are homemaking (cleaning, cooking) and taking care of our son. I then pass him off to his father, and I work the business (my passion!) for the next 7 hours. I come home, we put our son to bed, and then we have our dinner and evening time together.

I absolutely L-O-V-E my work. My husband, likewise is truly happy not having a corporate job any more, and while he would like more time to work on his projects, he knows that this time with his son is rare and precious.

This is what works for our family — and we have a lot of family time together. I do not think I could be a SAHM — it’s just not my deal. I tried it out, and on occasion, when I try it again and again (eg, DH works a full day in our business; I stay home), I find it difficult, tedious, challenging.

I’m not like these other women in our circle — women whom I love and value, truly, I do — but we are very different. I get excited about our analytics of our business, discovering whether or not our marketing is effective, and how effective it is. I love customer service, too. I get a buzz from my work, and from our business, that I don’t get being at home making dolls with the other women (I’m in a very unique group of crafty women! 😀 ). I just can’t get my head around that.

“Among the backdrop of guilt for being a mom, she tried a lot of things to make herself feel better. I was making a lot of money, so she did a lot of emotional spending. It didn’t help. I changed my work schedule to start at 4 AM so I could pick the kids up from school every day (and feed them and put them to bed). It didn’t help. Eventually, she started reading a bunch of books selling divorce. She ultimately decided that the kids and me were the problem, and that a divorce was the only way she could be happy. ”

@Anon,

I did all this and more. Worked from home just so I could be home when the kids got home from school. Her? All the same as your ex. Emotional spending, reading the books. Except she added in banging a coworker to find happiness.

So we just had Thanksgiving which I hosted. Thirty family members in the house we used to share. The kids there and they had a blast. Her? Alone. Broken family that doesn’t even live near each other. I heard that she was going to stop by a friends house for a bit. Nothing like the warmth we used to share here. I even see our three kids pulling away from her as they get older. The see her for the wreck she is.

The worst of it is that after she goes of on one of her tantrums on the kids I get to tell them that she loves them the best she can.

2 Brendan
==========================
In addition to the problems others have mentioned (most importantly the impracticality of it ince
men are not the limiting factor in human mating and reproduction),
==========================

How so? Attractive and well-off men always had choices before, and have them now. And what they want matters. The whole point of women being virgins before was to cater to needs of men who preferred virgins

==========================
Sandy, the long-term trend since centuries and beyond is for people to marry within their social stratum. Assortative mating based on class is not new, and it is mostly still the case today. Men of that class want to marry women of that class, and vice versa, by and large. And in order to be a woman of that class, a woman has to be very well educated, has to have had a career, and so on — these are class and status markers. A man chooses a woman like that because he is practicing assortative mating, as has been done since forever. The status markers of what it means to be a UMC woman would have to be changed, and men can’t do much about that — that’s in the hands of women and their parents.
==========================

Totally wrong. If a Harvard man wants to marry UMC girl, he doesn’t need to wait before she finishes her grad school and works for 5 years. He can marry her right after college, and then she can go to a grad school as a married woman. The idea that a girl gains status while riding the cock carousel is very wrong

2 TFH
==============================
Actually, a younger chick carries slightly less legal risk for a man, since the ideal age gap for marriage is for a man to be about 8 years older.
==============================

OK. So you actually agree with me

==============================
But that difference is minor, since *all* marriage carries horrendously unfair legal risks for a man.
==============================

Yes, but some men want to get married, they want kids and so on.

==============================
Separately, what you posted earlier implies that men should be controlled, when in fact it has been proven across many centuries and many civilizations that societal stability necessitates greater control over women, rather than men. Men require less ‘training’ to contribute positively within a society, than women do.
==============================

Men need to be controlled by themselves. It’s called self-control. Men need to make decisions which are beneficial for them in long-term and their kids (if they want kids). Decisions of men matter a lot

2 TFH
==========================
i) An alpha male/PUA can tie up 2, 3, or even 4 women for extended periods of time, making the man who is making a responsible choice far less relevant in his impact on women.
==========================

If this alpha dumps his older girlfriends and marries 23-year old when he wants to settle down, he sends a very powerful signal. Women care very much about preferences of alphas

==========================
ii) Women don’t necessary adapt to ‘signals’ being sent, as they are not very good at judging risks beforehand. We see evidence of this in how many women actually believe misinformation about the ease of having a baby at age 40, or how post-divorce life will be fabulous.
==========================

Women have strong sense of intra-gender competition and they want to get ahead. So when alphas and greater betas send signals, women take notes

2 Anonymous Reader
=======================
Only if men are able to reliably determine good women from bad ones. One predictor of future tendency to cheat or divorce (both bad behaviors) is “number of sexual partners woman had prior to marriage”. However, that is the one topic women are most likely to lie about…and therefore a key piece of data that men need will be deliberately withheld from them by women. Heck, some women even coach other women on how to be better at lying to beta men.
=======================
Younger girls have less time to get high partner counts and are safer bet just based on age alone, also there are some virgins among younger girls and not a very small percentage. If a girl is not a virgin, then a guy can hire a private investigator to find out about her past sexual history.

=======================
So women as a group are, by their actions, making it more difficult for men to make better choices. If women would shame and exclude high-partner count women, rather than help them pretend to be low partner count, then some women would not be haaapy, but most would benefit.
However I do not see any chance of than happening at this time.
=======================

To further complicate matters, insofar as the realities of modern life are concerned, there are those, such as my wife and I, who saw the truth too late. (And in our case there are some other factors.) We’re in a dual-income situation, though we’re optimistic about escaping it in 2012, where our gross income looks impressive, especially given our location. We’re not living the high-life. We budget, we brown bag, we drive used cars. As Country Lawyer mentioned, women were pumped to incur debt for degrees that don’t lead to corresponding salaries, so we’re essentially working for her education. Hindsight is 20/20, but it isn’t a time machine. That’s souring many in gen x and gen y on the locust lie. We have jobs thanks to our degrees that give us opportunity to earn money to pay for our degrees. It’s an untenable situation. The stats don’t capture the disillusionment that some are experiencing sooner than others. When those playing career woman converge with those trapped in careers, the shit and the fan are going to get much much more up close and personal.

If you live in Europe pre -suro… most countries limited the places in University and then gave some form of grant or scholarship to attend. This, coupled with degree delfation (what matters in the UK is the level of honours for your BA/MA, not your PhD) meant that the middle class could send their daughters and sons to university at no net cost.

This changed with the Thactherite revolution, and people not have to pay their fees. In NZ, you don’t get student grants, you get loans. And that is what leads to the poverty trap.

Now… if you are thinking of being an academic, (God bless you, We need scientists and scholars) you need to compete for the scholarships available and get your PhD, through post doc, and into a Austalina/NZ lectureship (which will lead to tenure if you perform well).

If you are in the US, graduate students are cannon fodder and there is no sense of a social contract. The best thing is to opt out: go to Uni in another coutnry,. or at your state school, and only if you feel led to be something that needs a degree — doctor, lawyer, engineer…

And then, if at all possible, join the military or ROTC and get it that way.
Pretending you are trust fund kid when you are not is simply stupid.

ARSo women as a group are, by their actions, making it more difficult for men to make better choices. If women would shame and exclude high-partner count women, rather than help them pretend to be low partner count, then some women would not be haaapy, but most would benefit.
However I do not see any chance of than happening at this time.
=======================

SandyYes, women do that, but guys can make good decisions anyway

Did you actually bother to read what I wrote? How does one make a good decision when others are providing false data – some doing so on purpose?

2 Anonymous Reader
=======================
Did you actually bother to read what I wrote? How does one make a good decision when others are providing false data – some doing so on purpose?
=======================

You don’t have to take the information other people give you about themselves at face value, you can check it if you want to

Lets say that low-partner count women did shame high-partner count women and this had some kind of impact. What would keep the high-partner count women from lying to us just like they do the men?

This is where the idea of marrying a virgin comes from. The white wedding gown to symbolize purity etc. Go ahead and lie all you want ,I’ll see if that vigina has been worked. A lot off things called the oppression of the patriarchy traditions answered these questions and made them nonissues. Think about it. Lets ay 50% of the population has a fatal STD with a ten year dead time and cannot be tested for. You live by biblical princples and it is no big deal to you. Don’t sex until you are married and only sex the one you are married to. You can lead full life in a cest pool and never know it.

2 TFH
================
Like most women, you gloss over the extreme and preposterously unfair anti-male laws, in a very ‘let’s get away with more’ way.
================
1) Why do you think I’m a woman?
2) Where exactly I gloss over laws and stuff?

================
Most men, even most MRAs, would have wanted to marry if they got Marriage 1.0 guarantees. Now that Marriage 2.0 does not have any such guarantees, marriage is very risky for any man. The marriage rate may be high, but is dropping.

Do you comprehend the difference between Marriage 1.0 and Marriage 2.0?
================

Yes, I do. But many men still want to marry. Case in point – Dalrock, the boss of this blog

================
Men have vastly more self-control than women, as Female Masculinist (a woman) wrote here. Again, you put all the responsibility on men, even though women are 90%+ of the problem.
================

An individual man cannot fix all the women, but he can make smart decisions for himself. If he wants to marry, then the stuff I wrote above will help him to make a right decision

================
Of course. Society depends on MEN putting the greater good above themselves, since women never will. When a man decides that becoming a pickup artists instead of a husband is a better deal, society is biting the hand that fed it.
================

OK. So?

================
Well, yes. I am in favor of this. This is in direct opposition to the ‘man up’ scam.
================

“Man up” is not a scam. The specific definition of what “man up” means might be scammy. I define “Man up” in a way that is beneficial to the man himself in the long term, his children (if he wants them) and society in general

I have to say, I thought you were a woman at first too. Something about seeming quasi-contrary to the nature of this blog, coupled with having a name that could be female, leading to the assumption that you must indeed be a woman. (For whatever that’s worth, perhaps as a caution against intellectual tribalism.)

That said, it sounds to me like the gestalt of your posting thus far lays out the moral imperative for game. And that is certainly a position I in which I can see much reason.

The truth is, great swathes of men get married because they have no clue what else to do, and they have somehow gotten it into their heads that – like women – they are “chopped liver” if they wind up a 30 year old bachelor. Patently ridiculous, but such is the nature of misinformation and ignorance.

I certainly see it as good for a man to be wiling to spend years sleeping around with unworthy women until he finds a good one to settle down with. The “sleeping around” is not ideal, but it keeps him sane enough to find a good woman, and sends a message to the unworthy informing them of their actual market value.

Surely, we can only benefit from actively exhorting men to this path – something that the late Solomon II did with aplomb.

This is not a complete solution – cultural restrictions on women are still called for – but it is certainly something useful and actionable for today’s man.

Same ol’, same ol’. When women screw up big time, it’s time for men to pick up the slack so women can keep on screwing up without reaping the consequences. God help us to make women responsible of her decisions.

Sandy’s arguments have been repeated once and again for the last 30 years. Men want kids so men have to make wise decisions, be responsible and forget about Marriage 2.0. They have to change their behavior so women don’t have to change theirs. We know what the outcome has been.

We need to shame men. We need to shame financially successful men who marry single mothers, ex-sluts and older women.

So after thirty years of shaming men (deadbeat dads, testosterone-poisoned, shallow, dick-driven, rapists, sexual harassers, domestic abusers, etc), we have a whole new category to shame men. Congratulations! With another round of shaming, all the problems will be solved.

men need to be shamed and be told to man up (stop marrying ex-sluts)

You are very consistent: “man up” is the preferred form of shaming for men. “Man up” means “do whatever I want you to do instead of what you want to do”. For feminists, “man up” means “marry ex-sluts”. For you “man up” means “stop marrying ex-sluts”. “Man up” is the wildcard expression: when you look it up in the dictionary, you find that means anything you want: one thing and the opposite.

If it’s known that a single mother has NO chance of a man with good income marrying her, then it will make many women decide against becoming single mothers.

Right. As if American women are known to live in reality and act rationally. If it were that way, Opprah’s TV show would have no viewers.

I guess you have seen several single mothers you know marry good catches and you are extrapolating to a fantasy of financially successful men marrying older single mothers and preferring them to young single women, but believe me, besides your cousin and your acquaintance, IT DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY.

It has been proved that single motherhood DECREASES SHARPLY a woman’s MMV. This is evident for everyone to see. You can go to single mother’s blogs and see all these single moms whining and whining how they are not able to get a decent man, let alone a catch. You can see the remarriage rates of single mothers vs. remarriage rates of single women with no kids. This is a fact, Jack.

Does this mean women stopped being single mothers? On the contrary, single motherhood is in the raising in USA. So your theory is unsustainable.

It worked like this for millenia, women always knew that they could become single mothers if they wanted, but it would destroy their MMV, so they didn’t do it

Excuse me. I lived the patriarchy when I was young so I know what it was like instead of imagining what it was like.

There were no single moms in the first place because it was assumed that a kid needs a father and was no divorce. The theory was that both sexes had to be virgins when marrying and this happened in the majority of cases. But, for the ones that “committed the sin” of premarital sex, they could get away with it, if they hid it and woman didn’t get pregnant (very difficult in a world without contraceptives). If the woman got pregnant, it was a great scandal and shame FOR THE WOMAN. But the man and woman were forced to marry each other so the kid would have a family (and the scandal was hidden as much as possible).

This was called “shotgun marriage” (it had another name in my country) and happened from time to time (say, once in a year or so in a town of 30,000 dwellers). It was a shame for the whole family, for the woman and a major topic of gossip. I have not heard this expression for the last 15 years but it was common when I was a child.

Women married the first boyfriend they had because a woman who have had a boyfriend before (even if they were virgins), they were considered “touched” (which meant their marriage value was low). There was no shame for men to marry these girls: it’s only that men tried to get a better deal: you don’t buy a silver jewel if you can buy a gold jewel with the same price.

I remember when I was 12 y.o. or so. The maid who helped my mother to do the household chores came home crying. I asked my mother. She told me: “Something terrible has happened. Our maid’s boyfriend has dumped her. So she won’t be able to get married”.

I also remembered the first single mom I knew. I was 20 y.o or so. Society was changing. One of the most beautiful girls in my town was boyfriend of one of the biggest bad boys (he did drugs when this was still a minority). She became pregnant and it was a huge scandal and shock when she told she didn’t want to get married AND PARENTS didn’t force her.

Mencken
It seems almost comical in a way how a really good conversation on a social issue in the modern world of misandry seems to lead back to men not participating in the blue pill tradition of marriage . The logical solution due to women being able to vote is the PUA,MGTOW and the “peter pan”. (I like the term grass eaters as they are known in Japan). Very interesting how guys that have never spoken to each and following different paths come to the same conclusion even using different words to discribe the same conclusion.

Totally wrong. If a Harvard man wants to marry UMC girl, he doesn’t need to wait before she finishes her grad school and works for 5 years. He can marry her right after college, and then she can go to a grad school as a married woman. The idea that a girl gains status while riding the cock carousel is very wrong

Not sure where you live, Sandy, but where I live it’s pretty gauche for a successful 30-35 year old law partner to marry a 22 year old woman who just graduated from Harvard when all of his business and professional peers are married to women around 30 who have 5+ years being professionals themselves. The undergrad degree isn’t the status marker, the career is. That’s what you’re not getting here. It’s the status marker of being a UMC woman, and that’s selected for by UMC men. These guys are mostly not going to be selecting a woman just out of undergrad and, frankly, I don’t blame them. People change a lot in their twenties.

Shaming sluts is more likely to reduce the number of sluts than shaming the men who sleep with sluts. Men love sleeping with sluts. Men who can bed sluts don’t care what anyone outside their peer group thinks. And men’s peer groups cheer them on to sleeping with sluts.

A woman who wants to increase her marriage value should do these things:
1. Learn how to cook, bake, and take care of a house.
2. If she wants children, she should learn basic child care.
3. Learn basic home economics and house management skills.
4. Keep her weight down, her hair long, and her makeup tastefully applied.
5. Learn basic etiquette.
6. Learn how to dress tastefully from casual to evening formal.

Brendan, I think the status markers are different in the UK but Sandy has moved on from 18 to 22 (‘If a successful guy marries 18 year old girl, it doesn’t mean that the girl cannot go to college after she is married’) and I am struggling to think of anyone in my family who married that young ever.

I don’t think there was ever a time when this was in place for most people.
According to the US statistics, the average age difference at marriage was 4 years. Pre war in the UK age differences of 10-12 years were more common. This was especially amongst the upper classes but they didn’t exactly behave in the way some would want them to. It was common for both men and women amongst them to have extra marital affairs. Sometimes, the children were even brought up in the same nursery. The women had affairs with higher ranking men than the husbands e.g. both the Duchess of Cornwall (Camilla) and the former Princess of Wales (Diana) are descendants of royalty on ‘the wrong side of the blanket’ or sometimes younger men on the up and up, well sometimes similar ages to them but younger than their husbands, sometimes younger than them.

In other areas of society, women obviously married younger too but perhaps this was more a lower middle and middle class thing.

I find the conversations about home school fascinating as it’s just not something people do here. It certainly won’t be considered neglecting your child to send to school rather than school at home, more like the other way around unless there were special circumstances. I’m wondering if this is a US thing I don’t get (like Sarah Palin lol) but even Ma Ingalls didn’t homeschool?

We’re all so lucky to have these choices. My siblings and I went to boarding school from age 11 (and we had a choice), but my grandpa went at 5. He still remembers crying for his mummy and being told to toughen up. I suppose if he’d been upper class, he’d have been crying for his nanny instead.

And for all the talk of day care, back in the day, urban working class women used to *tie* their babies and children to beds when they went to work in factories. Imagine that. I wondered whether it was just in England but what did all those poor (as in financially) women in New York do?

For all the societal issues, it was the last quote that I actually find disturbing, albeit from more of an economic perspective —
“Fifty percent of my medical course was composed of women [….] the vast bulk of them, once they had gotten married and had children, actually wanted to stay at home and look after the children.”

Coming from a family of doctors this lines up exactly with what I’ve seen happen. Most of the female doctors drop out of medicine at some point to raise kids full time. Some do return to medicine later, but the female career in medicine based on what I’ve seen is probably at least 30% shorter and possibly more than that vs the male career, and I wonder how the total career length of the profession has changed over time.

It costs a huge amount to educate doctors (which we’re in pretty serious short supply of) and the cost of medical school is generally highly subsidized by the state directly or indirectly. If the career lifetime of a female doctor is much shorter because they’re leaving the work force earlier to take care of kids it has serious economic repercussions for some vital industries. I imagine they are similar issues with female engineers.

Not sure where you live, Sandy, but where I live it’s pretty gauche for a successful 30-35 year old law partner to marry a 22 year old woman who just graduated from Harvard when all of his business and professional peers are married to women around 30 who have 5+ years being professionals themselves. The undergrad degree isn’t the status marker, the career is. That’s what you’re not getting here. It’s the status marker of being a UMC woman, and that’s selected for by UMC men. These guys are mostly not going to be selecting a woman just out of undergrad and, frankly, I don’t blame them. People change a lot in their twenties.

This is interesting. I’m not part of the world you are describing. Based on this, it is the men themselves who are insisting that the woman go through this path. In that case, he really can’t complain if she comes with a history of past partners, substantial student loan debt, and a taste for heavy spending. But I would also say this is a very limited group of men.

“I suspect the bigger issue is that a significant percentage of men haven’t felt the incentive to prepare themselves as a provider”

I see this a lot. Even career oriented guys, once they’ve paid off the loans and been out in the working world for five years, don’t have a ton of motivation to “do better”. Let’s say you are making more then enough to live in a reasonably safe neighborhood, buy all the decent food and beer you want, go to concerts and travel a bit, etc. You have everything you need and nearly all the things you want that are outrageous, which isn’t hard as a single guy. If there is no family to provide for, no private school tuition, no college fund to save for, not piano lessons to pay for, why bother earning more.

Sure, most guys might be willing to take a shot at getting rich so they don’t have to work, but that isn’t the proposition most people have. For most people its something along the lines of work your butt off for three years or go back to school or whatever and at the end of that maybe you will get a 10-20% promotion at work. If you’ve got a family that 10-20% might actually buy things you want. If your a single guy who cares, it doesn’t change your lifestyle at all.

Roissy published a study showing that proximity, the fact that 30 something lawyer men spend a lot of time with 30 something lawyer women, explains most of the overlap in how people get together. It may not be that people prefer 30 something career women, but that they are exposed to them frequently in their work and social lives and thus get together more.

This is interesting. I’m not part of the world you are describing. Based on this, it is the men themselves who are insisting that the woman go through this path. In that case, he really can’t complain if she comes with a history of past partners, substantial student loan debt, and a taste for heavy spending. But I would also say this is a very limited group of men.

As I’ve remarked numerous times in different contexts, it very much depends on where you live.

Lavazza, wow at that graph from Finland. Wish it went back further so we could see for definite. I suppose Finland would have been very agricultural and wouldn’t have had the domestic service and factory culture so would have likely seen young marriages. And less of a class thing, maybe Swedish-speaking Finns and Russians but not much of an upper class.
Interesting how the age gap stays so similar. You’ve probably seen the US figures which go back to 1890.

Would you say the attitude to work and the concept of ‘family time’ at the weekend the same in Sweden as described for Denmark this Telegraph article?

Lavazza, wow at that graph from Finland. Wish it went back further so we could see for definite. I suppose Finland would have been very agricultural and wouldn’t have had the domestic service and factory culture so would have likely seen young marriages. And less of a class thing, maybe Swedish-speaking Finns and Russians but not much of an upper class.
Interesting how the age gap stays so similar. You’ve probably seen the US figures which go back to 1890.

Would you say the attitude to work and the concept of ‘family time’ at the weekend the same in Sweden as described for Denmark in this Telegraph article

Lily, I also went to boarding school like your grandfather, not at age five though. Didn’t know there were boarding schools that cater to that age group. Even though my parents sent me to boarding school, they were both still very involved in the day to day events of my life but were incredibly scared of the education levels dropping at public schools, with the associated take over of the ANC. Their fears became true, the public school system is a disgrace and an indoctrination center of liberal propaganda, with all the dumbing down of the proper subjects from languages to science and maths and the rewriting of history to suit their liberal world view.

I am grateful for being sent to a private boarding school, not for being sent away from my parents for weeks at a time, but for having a proper “old school” education while being taught to look after myself without constant intervention from others.

Home schooling sounds more like a real substitute if you cannot afford private school. If you can afford to give your children the best private school education, why wouldn’t you? Home schooling doesn’t really factor in then. I think this is more of a public school vs home school debate and I would take home schooling over the public school system any day of the week. Not matter what Chels thinks!

I too am surrounded by Harvard men and women. (And MIT, Dartmouth, etc.) I can tell you first-hand that the men claim to consider it gauche to marry down in terms of age and professional accomplishment because they simply don’t have the game to attract younger, prettier women.

You would think that somebody who has what it takes to go to Harvard would have his pick of the best women. Nothing could be further from the truth. In a bygone era, perhaps, but not in today’s post-feminist world, where empowered women don’t need a Harvard man to win the rat race. In fact, with the nature of modern college admissions – essentially an elaborate hoop-jumping routine that now starts in kindergarten – I would say elite schools select against facility with women, for the men who have made it into those hallowed halls have, by definition, spent the bulk of their lives engaged in hoop-jumping. And a man who’s primary skill is hoop-jumping will fare poorly with women (Game 101).

As for the types of women at Harvard – well, the hottest ones don’t go there. In school, the pretty girls are the popular girls. They get invited to all the parties, and asked on dates by all the boys. The not-so-pretty girls don’t have the same experience – but thanks to modern culture, they have the same unbridled hypergamy. So when they realize they can’t get the top 10% of guys at their high school, they shoot for the top 10% of colleges as a surrogate alpha. Of course, not fully understanding the nature of things, they get there and are usually astounded to see that it’s not full of alphas, but rather smart betas who are good at jumping through hoops (barring the odd athletics admission). So the hypergamy circuits kick in again, and they get the elite job, and…

Eventually, they’re 30. They road the carousel, they ran on the career treadmill, and they’ve had enough. They grab the nearest man in their cohort – in my experience, these women are the most forward about initiating relations – and put the gears of “settling down” in motion. And the Harvard man tells himself that everything is going according to plan, all the while ignoring – willfully or otherwise – that his bride-to-be has spent the past decade getting rammed by “unworthy suitors.”

“Dalrock says:
…it is the men themselves who are insisting that the woman go through this path. In that case, he really can’t complain if she comes with a history of past partners, substantial student loan debt, and a taste for heavy spending. But I would also say this is a very limited group of men.”

I don’t agree. Yes, if you’re waiting until she’s 30 to marry her, you can’t expect her to have never had a boyfriend, and it’s unlikely that she’s a virgin.
But it could still be reasonably expected that she have few partners and very few sexual partners if she’s looking to marry.
It’s still reasonable to expect a woman with minimal student loan debt – and for it to be mostly paid off, if she’s been out of school for 5-8 years. A taste for heavy spending shouldn’t ever be tolerated.

I agree that those are seen regularly in such women, but I think it’s a problem of our current culture that heavy student loan debt (especially combined with low earning power) and flagrant consumer spending are considered reasonable in a 30-year-old woman (or man).
A decent woman (/person), even if waiting longer to marry doesn’t sleep around, doesn’t go into heavy debt for school, doesn’t go into consumer debt at all, and spends within her means. It’s reasonable to expect that out of someone at any age, and it would be nice if society did expect it.

2 Brendan
=========================
Not sure where you live, Sandy, but where I live it’s pretty gauche for a successful 30-35 year old law partner to marry a 22 year old woman who just graduated from Harvard when all of his business and professional peers are married to women around 30 who have 5+ years being professionals themselves.
=========================

OK, the man is so scared shitless that he might look “gauche” that he does things bad for him without even thinking about alternatives. In my book that’s not manly at all, an obsession with social status is a distinctively feminine trait

=========================
The undergrad degree isn’t the status marker, the career is. That’s what you’re not getting here. It’s the status marker of being a UMC woman, and that’s selected for by UMC men. These guys are mostly not going to be selecting a woman just out of undergrad and, frankly, I don’t blame them. People change a lot in their twenties.
=========================

OK. Guys can also marry 50-year old women, they will get a lot of life experience and extra doubleplus social status boost

@Feminist Hater
I’m assuming you are South African. Yes I can imagine.

I’ve got nothing against home schooling or any type of schooling, it’s just quite unusual here and certainly I’ve never heard anything like this which Keoni Galt said. ‘You see nothing wrong with children being raised by the public schooling system while both parents work full time careers. This is basically materialistic-driven selfishness at the expense of the children who need substantial and meaningful relationships with both of their parents more than they need institutional brainwashing’. Because if someone says something like ‘you see nothing wrong’ it gives the impression that what they are doing is the regular thing. So I’m wondering about the attitude towards home schooling is in the US.

Clearly most people in the UK don’t pay for private education (day or boarding*), but whilst a fair few would have something to say about two people in full time work/latchkey kids etc, whether the mother worked or not the child would be in school the same no of hours. I just can’t imagine saying saying sending a child to school is materially-driven selfishness or at an expense of a relationship with their child. There has been some murmuring on whether we should start school as young (they start later in Scandinavia and do better) though. Though certainly not amongst older/traditional people.

Re boarding school, age 5 was more usual in my grandpa’s time, you can still send children in preprep ages but quite unusual these days. I think most people would think it a bit barbaric, unless say you worked in the Foreign Office were got posted somewhere unsafe/very poor education.

*there are actually a few state and charitable boarding schools and looks like there are going to be more state ones, the govt is planning some specialist maths and science ones as part of the inward investment plan.

2 Kai
====================
I don’t agree. Yes, if you’re waiting until she’s 30 to marry her, you can’t expect her to have never had a boyfriend, and it’s unlikely that she’s a virgin. But it could still be reasonably expected that she have few partners and very few sexual partners if she’s looking to marry.
====================

It’s totally unreasonable to expect a 30-year old woman to have a very few partners. In a modern hook-up culture some women get to triple digits and most get easily to mid double digits. Susan Walsh by her own admission (she is very honest) had 20, and it was before the hook-up culture of today

I’ve never said this before but I agree with Kai. That is all completely reasonable.

And I never thought I’d stick up for Susan Walsh but she just said double digits not 20. She is something like 55 so this was 30 years ago. Off the top of my head the big AIDS thing was something like 1987. I don’t know about the early 80s (but she did say that in her day people didn’t even use condoms) but in the 70s there was a big hook up culture.

And it’s completely ridiculous to think most 30 year old women have had partners into the triple digits. You’re transferring what you would do if you had easy access to sex. It’s not the same.

OK, the man is so scared shitless that he might look “gauche” that he does things bad for him without even thinking about alternatives. In my book that’s not manly at all, an obsession with social status is a distinctively feminine trait

Most people follow social norms. You know that as well as I do. Good luck with your shaming campaign, Don Quixote.

OK. Guys can also marry 50-year old women, they will get a lot of life experience and extra doubleplus social status boost

I never said that these guys are thinking “the older the better”. What I said was that the status marker, around marrying age, is having a career — at least in the UMC circles I have experienced in coastal blue cities like NY, DC and SF Bay. Whether she keeps the career after having kids is totally irrelevant to the status marker and, as Dalrock’s lead post points out, increasingly uncommon among higher UMC couples where they can live a high UMC lifestyle on the man’s income. In fact, that has become a status marker in itself, as Dalrock points out.

2 Brendan
===================
Most people follow social norms. You know that as well as I do.
===================

If you are a human being and not a robot, programmed to appease society by whatever means necessary, you don’t need to follow every single social norm. Especially if it’s costly to you to follow it and you won’t get punished if you don’t follow it. What is the point of free will, if you cannot exercise it even in your personal life?

2 Lily
=================
And it’s completely ridiculous to think most 30 year old women have had partners into the triple digits. You’re transferring what you would do if you had easy access to sex. It’s not the same.
=================

What’s wrong with your reading comprehension? Where did I write that “most 30 year old women had triple digit count”?

Please accept my apologies, I was so taken back at your first sentence ‘It’s totally unreasonable to expect a 30-year old woman to have a very few partners’ that I didn’t read the second one properly (and bear in mind that’s after all some of your odd statements which aren’t consistent e.g. you changed from 18 to 22). But less of the personal attacks like that please, otherwise I’ll be tempted into what’s wrong with your social intelligence. And that would be rude and I’m English.

2 Brendan
When we are talking about UMC “gauche” stuff, it’s very important to distinguish the two cases.
1. An UMC career guy has sex with very hot girls (who are naturally young) and when he decides to settle down he goes after an older career woman
2. An UMC career guy cannot get hot girls for sex, he cannot choose anything, so he just gets picked up by an older career woman who has baby rabies and an urgent need to settle down.

Not sure where you live, Sandy, but where I live it’s pretty gauche for a successful 30-35 year old law partner to marry a 22 year old woman who just graduated from Harvard when all of his business and professional peers are married to women around 30 who have 5+ years being professionals themselves. The undergrad degree isn’t the status marker, the career is. That’s what you’re not getting here. It’s the status marker of being a UMC woman, and that’s selected for by UMC men. These guys are mostly not going to be selecting a woman just out of undergrad and, frankly, I don’t blame them. People change a lot in their twenties.

That must be why older women keep raising the age of consent. They are just trying to stop the older men from making a low-status decision!

It’s good to know that older women are looking out for “their” older men like that! They are truly selfless!

“Would you say the attitude to work and the concept of ‘family time’ at the weekend the same in Sweden as described for Denmark in this Telegraph article.”

Yes, parents meet other adults (most often parents of the kids friends or their own relatives) with the kids in tow for dinner parties or just chatting while the kids are practicing sports or after birthday parties, when the kids are watching a movie and the parents are having a coffee or a glass of wine together.The average married man with small children spend more than 70 hours a week on work (brown) and household chores (red), more than any other group.

2 Brendano
When we are talking about UMC “gauche” stuff, it’s very important to distinguish the two cases.
1. An UMC career guy has sex with very hot girls (who are naturally young) and when he decides to settle down he goes after an older career woman
2. An UMC career guy cannot get hot girls for sex, he cannot choose anything, so he just gets picked up by an older career woman who has baby rabies and an urgent need to settle down.

What case are we talking about?

It’s both. I’ve known almost *no* UMC fast-track career guys between 30 and 35 (this is when they tend to marry, if not later) who marry women who are 22. It doesn’t vary by how much they are able to have a lot of sex with young women (which itself, of course *does* vary) … if anything from what I have seen from where I have lived, these guys get married later (35-45) and to women who are, again, early 30s at the youngest. Even this group decides differently when it decides whom to marry.

Again, it depends on where you live. I am talking NYC, DC and SF Bay. I don’t doubt that things in Dallas or Denver or KC are a bit different, but the tenor of the UMCs in these areas is quite different, too.

If you are a human being and not a robot, programmed to appease society by whatever means necessary, you don’t need to follow every single social norm. Especially if it’s costly to you to follow it and you won’t get punished if you don’t follow it. What is the point of free will, if you cannot exercise it even in your personal life?

The point is this: If you are talking about shaming these men into marrying 22 year old Harvard grads, you must care about their own existing social environment and the pressures it exerts. Because that’s what you’re trying to overcome. And I’ve seen no evidence at all in anything you’ve written that comes to close to being able to even crack that. I would have thought this to be obvious, but I guess I had to point it out — which is odd when this whole conversation started by you suggesting social shaming. If you plan to do that, you have to do it in a way that overcomes the existing social pressures — and again, other than repeating the same things, I see nothing in anything you’ve written that could even come close to doing that in this case.

Well Kai, that’s just it, isn’t it? Women have the freedom to do anything they damn well please. And men are just needed to pick up the pieces and become an accessory to the fulfillment of a women’s dream . There might be good women who choose not to be apart of the current social dynamic. However, how do we know who they are and where can you find them? How do you trust a women? The only way is to test them like Dalrock suggests, with his questions to ask when interviewing for a wife.

And don’t think for a second that women don’t realise that they have been caught out by men. They do realise this and therefore will LIE in order to catch a mate and let the legal system do the rest. You really need to do a background check on a girl you like. You have to speak to her parents, her uncles and aunts, sisters and brothers and her friends. How often does she go out, where does she go out? With whom and to what hours of the morning? Hell, hire a PI, get a lawyer to do a background credit rating check and see how much credit she has taken out to fund her lifestyle. It really does sound rather mad, doesn’t it? However, that is the world the feminists and other liberal “do gooders” have given us. It also gives you a really good idea of what type of person she is, where her priorities lie and what kind of emotional baggage and financial turmoil you are about to take on. Trust me, if she has debt, YOU, not her, will be expected to pay it back.

It would even seem that women are allowed to spend tax dollars -rands in our case- going to university in search of themselves and to kick out men who need to have a career to support a family. They have the right, given to them by feminists, to ruin another family by placing them in poverty, to realise the dream of being a stay at home mom, who had a short career, a slutty past and was eventually forced by the sexist patriarchy to marry a beta chump, to bear his children and then forced by him and the patriarchy to stay at home and raise the kids. The HORRORS!

It tires me out just to type that. It’s depressing to say the least. Whatever happens in a woman’s life, it’s the mens’ fault. Come on men, man up and realise your destiny! So says Bill Bennett…

Im 31 and just did my MBA, any guy that my age that goes or his age or older is beta pussy, 18-25 is ideal. Hell even 23 is too old. I can’t believe the food on here that claims it’s cool to have these post 25 worn out career women due to peer pressure. That’s just nuts. The younger the better, the losers get their own age or oldies, it’s not a tough dynamic. Guys that go for the over 30 are Beta, unless your fifty keep em young, the volume of guys that I have met in their 40’s with 21 year old is staggering.

“This is interesting. I’m not part of the world you are describing. Based on this, it is the men themselves who are insisting that the woman go through this path. In that case, he really can’t complain if she comes with a history of past partners, substantial student loan debt, and a taste for heavy spending. But I would also say this is a very limited group of men.”

I’m not sure I completely agree either.

First of all, Brendan is 100% right that social pressure in the UMC will nearly always prevent a 30-35 y/o male from marrying a 22 y/o recent graduate. Though I would say that the pressure runs stronger the other way: that is, on HER not to marry so “young.” All her family and friends will press this message on her unless the milieu she comes from is very religious and conservative. However, he will get some pressure, too–from his friends, family, work peers, etc. Perhaps some of that is just envy (“Why should he get to marry that hot young thing when I couldn’t?”) but a lot of it is the belief, again, that she is not “ready” and there is a real maturity gap and none of his social peers will have anything to say to someone so much younger than they are.

There’s another issue which is not mentioned here but is also in play, viz., that the men themselves tend to assume that however nice it might be to screw a 22 y/o every night, they also think that she won’t be “ready” in a maturity sense and also that she might be really vapid and boring to talk to whereas just five more years make her much more “grown up” and interesting.

I also think Kai is right that she need not necessarily be burdened by lots of partners, debt, bad habits, etc. She might be but “well brought up girls” in the UMC first of all tend to have college paid for. I am out of touch I guess but I suspect that relatively few of these girls are hardcore carousel riders. However, they WILL have had BFs and they won’t be virgins on their wedding night because, as we have discussed at length, society (and potential husbands) long ago stopped expecting that of them. This is what I was trying to point out way back when: a big part of the reason that stigma went away was that once we shooed all the girls into college and then into the workforce, they inevitably delayed getting married but they also didn’t delay sex. Parents and society “Findlandized” to this new reality rather than challenging it. Just an explanation, not an endorsement.

Anyway, it’s not the men who “insist” that the women get a career, though the typical UMC male won’t marry a woman with no career at all. It’s much more the women and her family/friends who insist. The career is a self-esteem marker for the woman moreso than for her mate. She needs it to feel “complete” for herself, to make her parents proud of her, to feel at least equal to her friends and classmates, and also to feel superior to those who never had a career. It’s about HER psyche, not his.

Brendan: I just don’t see much evidence that a woman’s career has as much INDEPENDENT value to men (even UMC intellectuals) as you suggest. Yes, intelligent men like intelligence in a woman, and most men want a wife to have enough education and social sophistication to be an asset to them. However, it is also a frequently repeated theme in the manosphere that no man ever falls in love with a woman’s resume. That statement has only a slight degree of exaggeration. In general, men are not turned on by saying “my wife the doctor” or “my wife the lawyer” in the way that women would be proud of their husbands’ professional accomplishments.

I suspect that there are two factors at work here. The first is proximity. Davver pointed to a post on Roissy’s blog referring to a study which indicated that proximity rather than preference was primarily responsible for much of the trend in assortive mating. People of similar socio-economic status tend to live together, work together and eventually marry each other. That does not mean that the woman’s career in itself matters much in terms of men’s marital preferences. Secondly, most of the men who marry older professional women are (despite their UMC status) betas who don’t have the option of marrying younger, hotter women. YMMV of course, but I don’t think that the trend you are observing is widespread outside of a specific segment of feminist-influenced professional men in the nation’s most liberal cities.

Funny thing, my wife is Gen X, in her early 40’s. We married when whe was 27, and she burned out on her career within a couple of years of us tying the knot. Guess what? We met at work…

In other words, once her career served it’s two purposes (making ends meet while single and putting her in proximity to high-potential bachelors) oddly enough she no longer found the drudgery and toil of dealing with the corporate world to be enjoyable. Now, to her credit, she plugged away until we had kids, and even now when she has three kids to take care of she works part time (from home) to help get us through the obamaconomy. But she resents the time she spends working instead of doing something with the kids.

The status markers are different in the UK than Brendan describes for certain parts of the US.
Many UMC who marry in that hot marriage age of 28-32 are marrying women they’ve been since they were about 23-26, they’d usually have lived together first. Though as he says for the US there are a few who marry older 35-45, and they’re obviously not marrying 18 or 22 year olds.

1) You’re right that men are not attracted to the career per-se. But they are attracted to the fact of it, or to say better, they would be repelled by the lack of it. It doesn’t have to be a career on a par with his; and for most guys it’s better if it’s not. So, if he is in BigLaw, yeah he might marry another Senior Associate but he might also just as easily marry the woman who works for the non-profit law clinic. What he won’t do is marry that receptionist or secretary. That’s too far down the status scale. Merely being a lawyer for some soggy cause is not because she is still at least a lawyer (assuming other factors being equal, such as comparable family backgrounds and schooling.) Also, if he is Yale Law the chance of him marrying someone from Case Western is not high. Reverse that, and the chance of a marriage is near zero. There still is assortive mating going.

2) Definitely not true only among feminists and betas. I have observed several marriages of people most here would qualify as “alpha” and they all chose women comparable to themselves in SES and education. None of them married a radically younger woman.

Some of the discussions going on in this thread are hand-wringing over symptoms. Delayed adulthood and assortive mating mean that men and women who wait to get married are going to marry one another. No amount of shame or fancy education is going to make a 22 year old fizgig the ideal target for an established 35 year old. Sexual attraction is not the end all, be all of compatibility. Maturity, the way a young girl comports herself, conversational ability, shared perspective, and the like are big factors. Demanding men marry young women from outside their circle is just a prettier version of ‘man up.’

Delayed marriage and motherhood are the cough and the sneeze, they are not the virus.

2 Brendan
=====================
The point is this: If you are talking about shaming these men into marrying 22 year old Harvard grads, you must care about their own existing social environment and the pressures it exerts. Because that’s what you’re trying to overcome. And I’ve seen no evidence at all in anything you’ve written that comes to close to being able to even crack that. I would have thought this to be obvious, but I guess I had to point it out — which is odd when this whole conversation started by you suggesting social shaming. If you plan to do that, you have to do it in a way that overcomes the existing social pressures — and again, other than repeating the same things, I see nothing in anything you’ve written that could even come close to doing that in this case.
=====================

So you are saying that the opposing force is too strong, so it doesn’t make any sense to attack it. When feminists started their activism the opposing force was way stronger and also feminist ideology went against human nature. The stuff I’m talking is very compatible with human nature and I believe that it will win in the end. Kooky and nonsensical theories don’t live forever. To me it’s better to do what’s right, especially if it’s directly benefits me and my children even if it goes against “social norms”

The point is moot anyway. The only females who would even consider getting married very young are religious girls or (very rare) secular conservatives who long to be homemakers. UMC blue city career go-getter males wouldn’t even know where to look for such girls even if they wanted one. The actual 22 y/os they are going to meet in the city would not consider marriage at that age.

Escoffier – I’m not on the market, so I’m biased, but I generally prefer talking to a 25 y.o. to a 22 y.o. I’m 36. If I were single, I doubt I’d be trolling commencement ceremonies. I obviously wouldn’t say no to the right 22 y.o., but the likelihood of meeting a marriage-minded one, for the reasons you mentioned as well as having enough common interests to just happen upon one, are low.

2 Escoffier
=================
The actual 22 y/os they are going to meet in the city would not consider marriage at that age.
=================

A 22 year old in love with an alpha will not consider a marriage to him (or living together monogamous relationship), even if they will have children later and she will have an opportunity to study and advance her career? I find it extremely hard to believe. My points about marriage also cover a monogamous relationship.

Yeah, I’m not on the market either but every once in a while I talk to college girls or recent graduates and while many of them are certainly very pretty and quite a few are very nice and very smart, I am never tempted to say “Let’s go off to a cafe to talk for three hours.” If I were single, I doubt I’d be interested either.

“A 22 year old in love with an alpha will not consider a marriage to him (or living together monogamous relationship), even if they will have children later and she will have an opportunity to study and advance her career?”

Well, I doubt it. I know or occasionally come across a few of these girls and they are into their careers at that point. Plus, for whatever reason, they feel they are not “ready”–a message that is reinforced by their family and friends. And, even if you only believe 1/10th of what you read on this blog and others like it, then the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming that, no, they definitely won’t marry at 22.

2 Escoffier
================
And, even if you only believe 1/10th of what you read on this blog and others like it, then the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming that, no, they definitely won’t marry at 22
================

What about being in a monogamous relationship for 6 years and marrying at 28?

As I have said a couple of times things where really different in my native Sweden. Most people I met at uni married before 30 and to people they met at uni. 20-30 % married later and to people they met after uni. Also few people had kids before 30. My sister is the only one I know from uni who had a kid rather early (at 26). And 90% had a traditional age difference of 1-3 years. In fact, even when including acquaintances the only 5+ age difference I have encountered is a guy whose second marriage is to a woman15-20 years his junior (actor/director married to an actress) and (maybe) my fomer SIL who remarried a guy 5 years her junior at 32 (she is good looking and he is precocious).

Personally for me, it hasn’t got much to do with age, except the fertility problem of women over 30. It has got to do with her priorities. If career comes before marriage, don’t bother. Let them keep cats.

Sandy – I don’t know that there is a target age. It should be more about shared expectations and work ethic. But, bc of that, I would suspect that the 35 is more likely to meet and pair with 28+. I have a friend whose wife was 26 or 27 and a virgin when they met. They’re not all on the carousel.

First, my husband and i prepared to have a baby and for me to be a stay at home parent for the duration.

At the time, i felt that being a stay at home parent would be great. after I had the baby, I found it to be very tedious.

i had options such as taking up crafting or volunteering, but I have no interest in crafting, and while I love volunteering, but we weren’t SO Financially stable that if i were to work, I could volunteer. I might as well get paid, and add to the family income.

Second, my husband and I wanted to move to another country. We, of course, had options, but the easiest option was to start a business in the new country. Since I had been running my own business both before and (part time) after having the baby, and that was a prerequisite for granting the visa, we opted to start this business.

This did a lot of things for our family: 1. my husband was able to get out of his corporate work (which he disliked) and move into consulting as well as following his passion; 2. it allowed us to move to another country where we could have a better quality of life; and 3. it allowed me to really follow my passions.

We are not unhappy with the fact that my husband is largely the SAHP — or primary care giver — at this point. In fact, we are quite happy with it. I am quite happy working, and being the “primary bread winner” and I get an absolute THRILL out of the work.

To be sure, I love my son and I did want him (and do want him). But I don’t feel it’s absolute that a woman “should” or “must” stay home. If she wants to — then I say more power to her! — but if she doesn’t, i don’t see why that would be “socially enforced” in some way. And likewise, I wouldn’t want to socially enforce that my husband must be the breadwinner, when he is happy in this current role.

And no doubt, in the future, things will shift again as DS is in school more, and we will both be able to pursue the work (our passions) even more and earn greater income from both.

2 Ulysses
======================
Sandy – I don’t know that there is a target age. It should be more about shared expectations and work ethic.
======================
What does it mean? Work ethic like “work hard”, “don’t steal stuff from work” or something else?

======================
But, bc of that, I would suspect that the 35 is more likely to meet and pair with 28+. I have a friend whose wife was 26 or 27 and a virgin when they met. They’re not all on the carousel.
======================

OK. And if this guy meets the same woman when she is not 26, but 24, would he reject her?

It’s funny because I have dates with a 32 year old Harvard grad and a 24 year old generic girl this week. The truth is, I really do think smart experienced girls offer some big pluses, I just wish they stayed attractive and fertile for another decade more then they do. I hit it off great with Harvard girl but I’d be lying if I said the fact that we’d need to be married and have kids before she was 35 doesn’t hang over me.

Sandy – Work ethic as in relationships and marriage are work. Will either partner bail after the first fight? Things like that are what I’m thinking.

As to my friend, he probably would not have rejected her at 24, but it’s not about age, it’s about the likelihood of meeting someone significantly younger outside of a pickup situation. Quality young women aren’t hanging around office parks with an “open for business” sign.

Like most guys of a certain, I did not get the “opt out/stay home” option (I started my career in ’81). Beforeyou post back, be real-the paradigm rebelled against, the 50s model still extant when I entered the work, said “guys work”, period. And guess what-it’s a bitch. But I didn’t have a uterus, and didn’t have choice. I think the younger generation of males, or at least a significant segment of them, is getting it. The family trap means you put on the tie, overalls, jumpsuit whatever and work. Many are saying “meh”. I applaud you . The more money you make, which usually takes a while in career or business, the more your sexual marketable improves. And if you stay single your whole life; big deal. We live alone and die alone; some of us do it in relationships. Where do people get the idea that being single is like acne, something thet need to get rid of ASAP? BTW the idea of marriage based on mutual sexual/romantic attraction, monogamous, lasting decades woudl have astounded nearly every human who has ever lived. Marriages last best when they HAVE to; the fact that 50% of them do now is a miracle to be wondered at.

I have been married of 30 years.But I would not encourage ANY amn to try to emulate me. Teh fact that we are compatible, happy is based on pure dumb luck. I have known far too many committed, loving, wonderful people who didnt last (after 30 years, the number of extant couples from our early years that we could invite to a party wouldn’t fill our modest living room.)

Marriage ain’t anything anyway. Having kids is the bright line test. Before you do, divorce is just math.It’s ugly, it hurts, but no one loses-even if one of them still wants the marriage it ain’t worth having if the other doesn’t. Kids change that; they lose their family, and it ain’t their fault.

I’ve talked too much and said too little. Old men are like that. I figure I’ll post until you Xers etc. wake up to the fact that the Boomers ahve totally screwed you over and herd us all into concentration camps.

I forgot to check to get replies. I’d be interested to hear what you have to say. I only mentioned my status so you’ll know I have no dog in the race re dating, love etc.I was not bragging. Adn no I don’t have any “secrets” like start getting published aorund Valentine’s Day. Oh yes I do-there are no secrets. Stay lucky.

Girls in their 20s have three options w.r.t. their sex life:
1) Marriage or a monogamous relationship leading to marriage
2) Cock carousel
3) Sexual abstinence

Cock carousel leads to damaged or destroyed bonding ability, STDs (some of them are incurable and some of them destroy fertility) and psychological problems. Sexual abstinence for a long time might mean a non-existent sex drive. So the only good choice is 1). Based on Brendan’s posts UMC social norms enforced by men push women to cock carousel, so UMC culture looks pretty sick and perverted

2 davver
=========================
It’s funny because I have dates with a 32 year old Harvard grad and a 24 year old generic girl this week. The truth is, I really do think smart experienced girls offer some big pluses, I just wish they stayed attractive and fertile for another decade more then they do. I hit it off great with Harvard girl but I’d be lying if I said the fact that we’d need to be married and have kids before she was 35 doesn’t hang over me.
=========================

If girl 24 is smart, she will get to 32 in eight years and will be smart and experienced. But girl 32
will never get to be young, hot and highly fertile again

2 Ulysses:
=============================
Sandy – Work ethic as in relationships and marriage are work. Will either partner bail after the first fight? Things like that are what I’m thinking.
=============================

If you define it like this then younger women have less chance to bail due to bonding. A girl at 30, with 30 notches will have a very weak bond (oxytocin based) with her husband and is likely to bail, if things get tough. A younger girl with significantly lower notch count will be bonded to a guy and will stick though a rough period in a marriage

=============================
As to my friend, he probably would not have rejected her at 24, but it’s not about age, it’s about the likelihood of meeting someone significantly younger outside of a pickup situation. Quality young women aren’t hanging around office parks with an “open for business” sign.
=============================

Where women at 24 spend their daytime? It would be either work (office parks) or a grad school. And what’s wrong with pick-up or exploring social circles?

Sandy, Brendan probably doesn’t have much to back up his notion of UMC men forcing women onto the cock carousel, due to the “pressure” that they require their wife to have a career before marriage. He and Escoffier have this idea in their heads that it is societal and community pressure forcing these men to find a woman with a career and status. Which entails obviously finding an older women as that’s the time it takes to set it all up. As if that’s all that counts. Why would such people get married in the first place? If it’s only for status and not for the romantic love that women love to sprout on about or to start a family to continue your family line? If you get married for the wrong reasons or if marriage and family are only an accessory to your career and life dream of being the ultimate feminist’s fantasy, then I don’t really care what they think.

Also, since I don’t live in the leafy upper middle class suburbs of America, I cannot comment about the anecdotal evidence that Escoffier brings to the table, however, I do come from a well to do background down here and what he says ain’t true where I come from. You generally look for a well to do family with a young girl who went to a good private school. Boere meisies are generally very blonde and very pretty. You get married and work towards achieving your career, both you and your wife, whilst having a family and doing everything else. It’s part and parcel of marriage over here. Marriage is the cornerstone of our community and everything else becomes its accessory. At least that is how it was 10 years ago. It still very much is but you know liberals, they cannot leave well enough alone!

Oh…Forgot, obviously older, used up pussy can hold an interesting conversation whilst a younger, virginal pussy can’t. Did they ever think that you get to know a person the more you spend time with them and that you can develop passions together as a married couple? And that the younger you start, the more passions you can obtain together? Obviously not. They think that both the male and female must be set career wise before even entertaining the notion of marriage.

Still, one sounds like a good option, although option 4 sounds better, GET MARRIED! If you find the right person, why wait? If you’re a man, just beware the legal system!

Based on Brendan’s posts UMC social norms enforced by men push women to cock carousel, so UMC culture looks pretty sick and perverted

Interesting then that the UMC has high marriage rates and the lowest divorce rates of any demographic slice, isn’t it? What perversion.

Look, marriage is in trouble in general in the culture, but the place where it is in the *least* trouble is in the UMC. There are various reasons for that, but what is happening there isn’t leading to even an average level of divorces.

Brendan probably doesn’t have much to back up his notion of UMC men forcing women onto the cock carousel, due to the “pressure” that they require their wife to have a career before marriage. He and Escoffier have this idea in their heads that it is societal and community pressure forcing these men to find a woman with a career and status. Which entails obviously finding an older women as that’s the time it takes to set it all up. As if that’s all that counts. Why would such people get married in the first place? If it’s only for status and not for the romantic love that women love to sprout on about or to start a family to continue your family line? If you get married for the wrong reasons or if marriage and family are only an accessory to your career and life dream of being the ultimate feminist’s fantasy, then I don’t really care what they think.

This assumes that you cannot find someone who is SES assortative attractive and fall in love with them — which is not only incredibly ignorant and stupid, but also happens to be completely wrong. But you wouldn’t know, would you?

2 Brendan
===================
Interesting then that the UMC has high marriage rates and the lowest divorce rates of any demographic slice, isn’t it? What perversion.
===================

Are you arguing that pushing young women onto the cock carousel is somehow normal and not perversion at all?

===================
Look, marriage is in trouble in general in the culture, but the place where it is in the *least* trouble is in the UMC. There are various reasons for that, but what is happening there isn’t leading to even an average level of divorces.
===================

OK, you established that UMC does better than ghetto culture, so what? I never argued against that

Um, the UMC women Brendan is talking about are the sort who don’t have sex at all rather than risk the low status of an abortion. They tend to stay away from the carousel because it’s still low-status to chance it, for many of them. They are for the most part low count women. It’s a very different social milieu to what the manosphere is familiar with.

2 A Lady
===============
Um, the UMC women Brendan is talking about are the sort who don’t have sex at all rather than risk the low status of an abortion.
===============

Abortion is a very private affair. Early stage abortion can be very easily hidden. So abortion doesn’t change status

===============
They tend to stay away from the carousel because it’s still low-status to chance it, for many of them. They are for the most part low count women. It’s a very different social milieu to what the manosphere is familiar with.
===============

BS. Women have sex with alphas because they have a sex drive and because they can hide it:
1) What goes on in college, stays in college
2) Big cities provide anonymity

This assumes that you cannot find someone who is SES assortative attractive and fall in love with them — which is not only incredibly ignorant and stupid, but also happens to be completely wrong. But you wouldn’t know, would you?

Well Brendan, what I am trying to get across is that marriage success, at least in my opinion, is not due to finding a wife with a career and status above all else. It’s not even about finding someone so incredibly hot that you fall madly in love with them. Marriage success is about balancing all those factors out and then finding the best person suited to you. Factors, such as career, status within the community, financial stability, LOVE, previous history and many others form part of decisions that each person must make before marriage and in respect of attractiveness, you would be better off finding a spouse who is of the same general attractiveness as yourself. Shooting too high or too low isn’t optimal, it’s striking it lucky or settling. You say that the UMC men and women settle due to societal pressure. I can’t disagree with you since I don’t live there myself but you haven’t given me much more to go on. I just have a different opinion.

Anyway, the romantic illusion of marriage fades with age but you need romantic attraction in the beginning to have the basis for a normal marriage. Else, you would have to arrange marriages and force young people to marry each other. I prefer somewhere in the middle.

If UMC American people marry for status, career and settle for a stable lifestyle with one parent working and the other staying home; and if that’s what they have come to expect from a marriage, then their marriages will probably work out in the end. That could be a reason for their low divorce rates. Financial success coupled with a realistic expectation of who they are marrying and why they are marrying. They are marrying for convenience sake rather than for the purposes that I would marry for such as family, pair bonding, love and the simple ability to share your life with someone, through the good times and the bad times. I’m better off not marrying if status, career and societal pressure were the only reasons to get married. It also makes sense that if you marry younger you have far more time to make that pair bonding with your spouse and the ability to make that a reality hasn’t been affected by a high partner count.

I might be ignorant of the current status of pairing off in today’s world. Especially the UMC of America. However, I see marriage between people within my community and for better or worse, they work through their marital problems. It ain’t merely about status for them. It’s about making the marriage work. People around here have been dirt poor and built everything up from scratch, numerous times, and the divorce rates have remained relatively low all that time. Only since liberalism and feminism have divorce rates started to rise. And due to South Africa having had Apartheid, which ended officially in 1994, the effects have not been felt to the degree that they have been in other places like Australia, America or Europe.

I have seen dirt poor people stay married when the richest people will divorce over something trivial. In certain cases, the poverty only made their marriages stronger. It’s a different mindset, one geared towards family and God above wealth and status. Marriage success, in my mind, isn’t about money, career and your status within your broader community but rather what you expect from marriage and how you were brought up. A person can suddenly be in dire poverty but if they were brought up with a solid educational foundation within a loving family, not all the liberal crap taught in public school, they stand a far, far greater chance of creating success in life and marriage, if they do in fact get married. I would have thought that this is common sense. A simple reason for why UMC marriages work out more on average than lower class people, is that those within the UMC have a far better upbringing. America, back before liberalism became mainstream, provided a very strong educational level to most of its population. Now its public school system is in dire straights and bad marriages, in my mind, are an offshoot of this problem.

Anyway, as others have said, you cannot compare Ghetto culture with that of the UMC.

It’s a lot simpler than that, really. It’s a lot like the old English class system. People first sorted potential mates by class and then they did the secondary sort by SMV and MMV. The hottest lower class girl was not going to marry even an average upper class boy.

In the American UMC, we don’t have “class” in the same way so we sort by upbringing (who are your parents and where did you grow up?), education (where did you go to school?) and career (is what you do high or low status; renumeration is primary for women seeking men, but not that important for men seeking women). After all that is sorted out, people consider attractiveness WITHIN the cohort that they consider to be their SES “equals” or near-equals.

They don’t “settle” due to social pressure but they do preemptively rule out whole categories of people due to social pressure (and also to personal preference).

In other words, the mechanism is not that different, the criteria have just changed.

It’s a lot simpler than that, really. It’s a lot like the old English class system. People first sorted potential mates by class and then they did the secondary sort by SMV and MMV. The hottest lower class girl was not going to marry even an average upper class boy.

The basic concept makes sense. Where it strikes me as terribly inefficient is in the US we don’t define class by lineage, and generally aren’t allowed to acknowledge IQ. So each generation of UMC is waiting for markers which only show up after many years and often spending a great deal of money. It was mentioned above that young women don’t make for fascinating conversationalists in the eyes of a 30 or 35 year old man. I don’t know about anyone else but the average woman my age was painful to talk with when I was in college. Yet I didn’t have any trouble talking to my wife when we first met and she was 4 years younger than I was. I think IQ is one of the missing criteria here. The woman who down the road has a successful UMC career was probably someone you could talk to when she was 18-20. Likewise my mother in law is fascinating to talk with but has never gone to college. She keeps up just fine with her STEM PHD husband too. We assume that education creates IQ, and a large number of fallacies follow from there.

I would however refine your point in the following way. Yes, the PC UMC has ruled all talk of IQ verboten (because, you know, if you admit that IQ exists then you have to admit that jews are smart and other groups are … less smart … and this makes everyone angry and no one likes to get yelled at so better if we just didn’t talk about it). However, what the UMC has done is establish various proxies for IQ. Admission to an elite college is one of them, probably the most important. The colleges know this, which is why they can charge a fortune and not teach kids anything. Nobody cares what you learn, or at least that is a second-order consideration. The point is, You Got In To Harvard!!!!! It is terribly, terribly inefficient, I agree, which is why (again) people like Thiel say that college is a bubble.

The “better” sorts in the UMC, i.e., the people with deeper character, actually do care what their potential makes know. They don’t want to just marry someone with a degree they want a partner with a brain, and not just a good brain but one that is “furnished,” to use Swift’s phrase. (BTW, to the real he-man-woman-haters here, check out Swift’s poem “The Furniture of a Woman’s Mind,” you will love it.) Alas, I would not say that they are in the majority. For most, the degree and the high status job are good enough.

Esc has it basically correct. There is a sorting going on by class proxy (which, for our non-US readers, plays out rather differently in the US due to very deep-seated social taboos against lineage/heritage based “social classes” apart from a truly tiny group of American bluebloods). While it’s true that you *might* get lucky and find a woman at 18-22 who would have been the type of woman you would be selecting for between 30 and 35, it’s a real crapshoot, because that history hasn’t happened yet. So it isn’t the general strategy taken, as it is fairly high risk given that there isn’t a track record. Note that this does not mean that these guys are waiting until they are 35 to begin to look for a woman to marry. In many cases they are marrying between 29 and 35 to women they have been involved with since their late 20s — i.e., since early in the woman’s career path, a few years after graduate school. That is a much more common scenario than a guy waking up at 35 and deciding he wants to marry and then walking over to the “carousel” to pick some leavings. Much more common is that these guys are involved with women from the time the women are 25-28 and stay involved with them for several years before getting married in the early or mid 30s.

And now an editorial comment. One of the more irritating aspects of the manosphere, I have to say, is the glaring and seemingly ubiquitous tendency to exaggerate and to over-reduce into rigid categories. So, for example, every woman who marries at 30 is a used up slut who has 20+ sexual partners and has been riding the cock carousel incessantly. Um, no. There sure are women like that, especially in the major metros. But there are also quite a few women who have the serial monogamy route, such that the guy they marry is a guy they got involved with around, say, 26 or 28, and he was their 3rd or 4th boyfriend. Maybe she’s had a ONS or two and that’s it. That’s the much more common profile for these women than a 25+ partner count carouseler, for the main reason that these women themselves generally are partiers and do not look to settle down until they themselves are in their early 30s — when the better guys are already with women they started dating when the women were 26-28. These are two different sets of women, although they are both in the same social class of highly educated, professional UMC women. I would say that in my own observational experience in NYC and DC, the percentage of these women who are in the partier group, while not insignificant, is not very large. The much larger group is the serial monogamy group. This is why it is quite correct for Dalrock to refer to serial monogamy as the new norm among women rather than the carousel-hopping slut. The latter do exist, but they are dwarfed in number by the serial monogamy group, at least in the UMC (I do think that in other social strata, the percentages are rather different).

So then the question becomes this: is a woman who has had 3-5 boyfriends by the time she is 26-28 a useless, used-up slut unworthy of any man’s attention? That’s the real question, and it’s a question that is often answered in one way in the manosphere, but which I see answered typically the other way in the real world.

BTW, in my observation, Washington is the most resume-whoring town on the planet. Job status counts for more there than it does anywhere else. In NYC it’s not nearly so bad (but it’s still pretty bad) and in SF, outside of tech ciricles, the job status issue is also less intense. LA is a lot more laid back about it because of the entertainment industry, you have a lot of nominally high-status, good looking people who are broke/unemployed/waiters/just breaking-in, etc.

While it’s true that you *might* get lucky and find a woman at 18-22 who would have been the type of woman you would be selecting for between 30 and 35, it’s a real crapshoot, because that history hasn’t happened yet.

I would disagree. Family background and IQ at adulthood are probably a better predictor of the future than anything else. If you have a sane smart woman from an intact family where the parents modeled a traditional marriage I would say that predicts the future better than any degree or job history.

And now an editorial comment. One of the more irritating aspects of the manosphere, I have to say, is the glaring and seemingly ubiquitous tendency to exaggerate and to over-reduce into rigid categories. So, for example, every woman who marries at 30 is a used up slut who has 20+ sexual partners and has been riding the cock carousel incessantly. Um, no. There sure are women like that, especially in the major metros. But there are also quite a few women who have the serial monogamy route, such that the guy they marry is a guy they got involved with around, say, 26 or 28, and he was their 3rd or 4th boyfriend. Maybe she’s had a ONS or two and that’s it. That’s the much more common profile for these women than a 25+ partner count carouseler, for the main reason that these women themselves generally are partiers and do not look to settle down until they themselves are in their early 30s — when the better guys are already with women they started dating when the women were 26-28.

While I generally agree on the editorial comment, I think there are some weaknesses to the general line of thought. There was an initial assumption following the sexual revolution that one could do “marriage lite” prior to marriage and everything would work out just fine. Indeed, it very much appeared to be the case. As a result, slut shaming went away as did men placing a premium on a woman’s virginity when looking to marry. What I think we have found is there was some inertia left over from the old system, and therefore each generation of women feel less and less bound to follow the “marriage lite” model. Tell a 20 year old woman she won’t marry for a decade and there is no shame in premarital sex and I think it is unfair at some point to blame her for taking a short ride on the carousel. From there, perhaps a little longer. The reality is the orthodox biblical view of sex is probably much closer to reality than conventional wisdom. There are two kinds of sex, sex with commitment and sex without. As appealing as the concept is there is no such thing as sort of commitment. We criticize women who suddenly expect their most recent boyfriend to convert her from uncommitted sex partner to wife and mother once she approaches 30. I think this is right, because it is more kind to the woman in the end to deal in reality.

Your model assumes that women can safely stay in an almost committed holding pattern for over a decade, all without any shame for promiscuity. As others have pointed out, big cities and foreign lands provide great anonymity. The model is asking a great deal from these women at the cost of their fertility, all for a very low real benefit.

As far as UMC low divorce rates, a number of separate factors would all predict this. Older women are less likely to divorce; I’ve shared the data on that. Women from married households are less likely to divorce. Men and women with higher IQs are also far less likely to divorce. As I said before, I think there is a presumption that something magic happens in the extra 10 years UMC men are waiting for their UMC wives to arrive. As the authors of the Bell Curve showed, IQ alone would have been a very powerful predictor of those same things. Add in checking her parents marriage, her basic sanity, and her virginity as a late teen early 20s woman and you have a very powerful sorting process. All without forgoing her prime fertility years.

Washington is definitely the worst, I would agree, in this regard. It’s because the area isn’t very diverse — it’s hugely college+grad school educated people who are either lawyers, government workers, or work for government contracting companies. They’re also mostly bunched together economically — the median incomes are high, but there aren’t as many filthy rich as in other places like NYC or LA –> it’s more bunched in the UMC segment for large swathes of suburbia. It’s a very un-diverse place in that way, and so job-status is the main social qualifier, to a huge degree. Talk to someone new at your kid’s soccer game or birthday party and no more than 2-3 minutes in comes the question “So … what do you do?”. This also impacts the mating market here, as it’s also prevalent in that context. It’s the main social status marker in DC, bar none.

I grew up in NY. In NY it depends on what circle you are in. NY is diverse — there are circles where job status counts for nothing, and circles where it counts for a lot. If you’re in the Manhattan professional circle, it count for a lot, but, in NY, money ultimately counts for more than job status. It’s different from DC in that way because the hi/lo in NY is much wider, and there are truly filthy rich people in NYC –> a young lawyer making 250k a year in NYC is at the bottom of the totem pole economically in the Manhattan professional circle (even though he earns a lot more than people in other circles in NYC do) . Not too many places like that, really. So, in NY people in your social circle/band will also ask you what you do, but it’s basically a proxy to try to guestimate how much you make, so that you can be placed in the brutal NYC economic hierarchy properly. And, money is also more important, in relative terms, in NYC than it is in DC, just because there are more really rich people there.

In SF Bay, my main experience is in the educational/tech areas, where it’s pretty similar to what I’ve seen in the DC area. The main difference is that, again, the Bay Area is much more diverse than DC is, so if you’re not in that circle the pressures are different. I don’t know LA very well — have a few college buddies who live there, but other than noting that it’s very different from everyplace I have lived, I don’t have a good sense of the status culture there (apart from noting that it’s much more looks-based than DC or NYC is).

You note that “Older women are less likely to divorce” (true from what I have read). Yet the drift of your argument suggests that (quality) women should marry younger. Do you think the other factors–high IQ, sane, virgin, intact home–will take care of the youth drag? That is, if you have those other factors, there is no or less danger of divorce from mere youth?

Because the presumption in the UMC is that it’s bad to marry too young because people are not “ready.” I don’t deny that there’s a self-serving element to that. 22 y/os are quite happy NOT to be pressured to marry by their parents and society because that amounts to tacit approval of treating the 20s as extended adolecence. However, the “not ready” sentiment is very real among the parents and peers. Most everyone believes it, whether it’s true or not.

I’m not describing a “model”. I’m describing reality in the places I have lived and in the UMC people I have observed there. It’s simply unrealistic, in my view, to expect most UMCs to marry when they are in their early 20s. A very small portion may, but that’s it. And, frankly, whatever factor is responsible, the UMCs who are marrying later on are not getting divorced a lot, either. Again, I don’t think this is the part of the demographic that should be getting this kind of focus. Marriage is more or less working here. The other demographics are where it isn’t any longer, and if people are interested in supporting marriages that work, it seems to me that much more hay can be made in those other demographics where marriage appears to be fading into the woodwork than obsessing about UMCs who are marrying in their early 30s, having kids, and staying married. Note I have no personal dog in this fight, as I married when I was 28 and my ex-wife was 24.

Because the presumption in the UMC is that it’s bad to marry too young because people are not “ready.” I don’t deny that there’s a self-serving element to that. 22 y/os are quite happy NOT to be pressured to marry by their parents and society because that amounts to tacit approval of treating the 20s as extended adolecence. However, the “not ready” sentiment is very real among the parents and peers. Most everyone believes it, whether it’s true or not.

I can attest to that; at that age, I was definitely not ready to marry, as doing so would have made my life much more difficult (balancing a challenging academic program with FT work, cooking, cleaning, laundry, on top of studying, there really aren’t enough hours in a day to do all that). Early marriage doesn’t have any advantages, only disadvantages.

As well, this talk about pairing younger women with older men will never materialize as women that age are turned off big time even by a 5 year age difference, not to mention 10-15 years. What 20-22 year old wants to be seen with an “old geezer”? Anyone who made such comments must not have spend any time with these young women. And even now, at 26, I’m turned off by an age difference that exceeds 10 years, I don’t want to be with someone who could be my father, and the majority of women my age and younger feel the same way (and I also don’t want to be 55 and be left a widow). Furthermore, 30 year old women don’t have cooties, and if fertility is a concern, they can still have at least 2 kids so I don’t understand why people find them so repulsive, if they weren’t whoring around (as well, the only way a man can expect a virgin is if he is one himself). I would also think that a match between people around the same age is better because they’re in the same point in their lives, have similar opinions, values, etc…

All of these ideas that certain posters have put forward have short and long term implications that haven’t been well thought out; the only goal seems to be to marry off people and that’s it, who cares about what happens next?

The UMC matters because in any kind of hierarchy, attitudes flow from the top down. What the perceived “opinion leaders” do will be modeled by people who pay attention to them. So when the upper middle class had “coming out” parties for young women at age 16, and proceeded to introduce her to a selected circle of young men over the course of the next 6 to 8 years leading to marriage sometime before the age of 25, they were setting a pattern. A pattern that middle class people tended to follow to a large extent, and that working class people more or less followed as well. Because that is what they saw the more successful people doing, and therefore (because we all unconsciously assume that correlation IS causation) doing those things would lead to success.

As a matter of fact, those patterns did lead to marital success, family success, and thus the success of society. Not because the UMC were so smart, but rather because the marriage pattern fit well with the way men and women’s brains, and emotions, and other things, are wired up. The pattern led to success because it was, to be poetic, “in harmony with the nature of humans”.

Now that the UMC believes that under 25 is ‘too young’ to marry, that women should not only got to college but also establish themselves in a career, the middle class is following that pattern as well, and a lot of working class people aren’t even bothering to marry at all. When the most future-oriented, impulse-controlled people in society basically say “Work comes first, marriage comes later when your life is all fixed up” that message will flow downward.

And in fact, study after study shows that poor women are following that model. They want children, and they want to be married, but they are willing to put off marriage until they are “all set up” in life. Of course the trouble with this is obvious: it leads to babymommas who expect some man to marry them when their oldest child is 3 or more years old, and that is asking a lot of any man because of the way we are wired up. So the pattern is in harmony with a different part of human nature, the older “nasty, brutish, short” mode that works – if you don’t mind living in grass huts, far below the level of an industrialized society.

I therefore suggest that the UMC model of “college, then work, then marriage” has indirectly contributed to the 40% bastardy rate in the US. Because attitudes flow from the top of hierarchy down, and unfortunately people with average or below average IQ simply can not order their lives as the UMC have chosen to do, and get away with it. But that doesn’t stop them from trying, because (all together, now)

I don’t see this at all. Just to keep it anecdotal for the moment. In my younger days, it was quite common for boys & girls (or young men & women) to be in exclusive relationships for years on end, beginning in college (and in rare cases even earlier). In college and in the years just after, these truly were “marriage-lite.” One thing they did not do was shack up; that’s still considered gauche in the UMC. But apart from they, were married without the ring (or sense of permanent committment). Many of these couples actually did go on to get married. So, what would have been the disadvantage of making it official sooner?

Here are some real advantages: one houseold to maintain instead of two, which is cheaper, and two people to maintain one household instead of one maintaining one each: less total effort dedicated to the same tasks.

So why didn’t they get married sooner? Two main reasons: 1) societal pressure; 2) “How can I be sure he’s really the one?” Well, if you can’t, then why are you sleeping with him?

I can attest to that; at that age, I was definitely not ready to marry, as doing so would have made my life much more difficult (balancing a challenging academic program with FT work, cooking, cleaning, laundry, on top of studying, there really aren’t enough hours in a day to do all that). Early marriage doesn’t have any advantages, only disadvantages.

Nah, you just want to have your cake and eat it too. You’re one of the women I don’t think deserve marriage or a dutiful husband. Your above protests stem from a modern day woman’s outlook on life, her career and the lifestyle she is used to. To you, it must be easy and smooth, anything else is a disadvantage. You mustn’t be made to sacrifice anything but expect everything to be on your terms. Marriage must only come after you have had your fun and finished your career and are ready to settle down. You, you, you.

As well, this talk about pairing younger women with older men will never materialize as women that age are turned off big time even by a 5 year age difference, not to mention 10-15 years. What 20-22 year old wants to be seen with an “old geezer”?

I’m over thirty and I had a barely 20 year old woman obviously hit on my in a store. Oh I flirted a little bit before she became.. AGGRESSIVE, but she was flirting even before that.

But I’ll agree that the kind of interaction you have with a 30 year old and a 20 year old are quite different. In most cases.

I’m not describing a “model”. I’m describing reality in the places I have lived and in the UMC people I have observed there. It’s simply unrealistic, in my view, to expect most UMCs to marry when they are in their early 20s. A very small portion may, but that’s it. And, frankly, whatever factor is responsible, the UMCs who are marrying later on are not getting divorced a lot, either. Again, I don’t think this is the part of the demographic that should be getting this kind of focus. Marriage is more or less working here.

So, how many children do each of these wonderful, intact, marriages at 30 produce?

“I therefore suggest that the UMC model of “college, then work, then marriage” has indirectly contributed to the 40% bastardy rate in the US”
Has it though? Isn’t most of it still in the ghetto, mainly black community? Whilst there are swathes of black women from lower SES who are following this model, aren’t they more likely to be childless than have had children out of wedlock?

The reality is the orthodox biblical view of sex is probably much closer to reality than conventional wisdom. There are two kinds of sex, sex with commitment and sex without. As appealing as the concept is there is no such thing as sort of commitment.

This is very true Dalrock and very well said.

doing so would have made my life much more difficult (balancing a challenging academic program with FT work, cooking, cleaning, laundry, on top of studying, there really aren’t enough hours in a day to do all that). Early marriage doesn’t have any advantages, only disadvantages.

As usual, wrong. To say that early marriages only produce disadvantages on a blog authored by a clearly intelligent man married to I assume a very intelligent woman (a couple who married quite young) is the height of presumption, But that’s par for the course from you.

I married while still in college and while it wasn’t without its challenges, life isn’t without its challenges. What we fail to recognize in this culture is that living as a mature healthy individual is about realizing that life is full of trade-offs. To choose one thing is to necessarily forgo something else.

A couple could simply decide to forgo children for the first few years of marriage while finishing school. Under those circumstances early marriage is perfectly doable.

No, my protests come from reality. I lived at home during university, and my parents paid for everything, so that I could focus on school.

If I decided to move out and still stay in school, the only FT job that I would have been able to get was a minimum wage job, meaning that I would have had to work at least 25 hrs per week to pay for half of my expenses. With 5 courses, volunteering for my profs to get reference letters, studying for those courses, doing the necessary things to be a good wife, where would I have fit in the minimum 25 hours to support myself?

Like I said, it’s not so much about wanting to have it easy, but rather about being realistic and not being superwoman to do it all.

You could have gotten a decent paying part time job. You had other options, but you are trapped in binary thinking. You are constrained, quite ironically, by your choice addiction despite its narrowness.

And more generally, the UMC model of marrying late and having 1-2 perfect children is obviously not sustainable. The UMC is down to planning 15-20 years ahead (certainly better than the usual 20 minutes of more average folks), but not enough to sustain its own status through another generation. There is already creeping single-motherhood, even though it is, yes, lower-status and sniffed at by the UMC.

You could have gotten a decent paying part time job. You had other options, but you are trapped in binary thinking. You are constrained, quite ironically, by your choice addiction despite its narrowness.

No, not where I live, there are no decent paying part time jobs for students; there are only McJobs.

So, how many children do each of these wonderful, intact, marriages at 30 produce?

One? Maybe, sometimes two?

Sounds functional.

Not really.

1-3 from what I have seen. Depends on how many they want. I have seen couples who married when the woman was around 30 have three kids, and others where the couple married in their 20s with one kid. It varies.

Chels, with the greatest of respect, the way you phrase things sometimes comes across as rather antagonistic. I can understand why you must sometimes feel provoked but just check yourself sometimes. You know like that thing where you get an email which annoys you but you leave it to reply to later.

Re early marriage, I’m not convinced on marrying during college years but obviously makes sense for some people. Seems could be more likely to work if you lived with one set of parents post marriage, but even in countries where this is more of the norm, you don’t see an awful lot of marriages during college years.

Actually no, I haven’t said that at all. What I said was that I had to take a few years off when I had our first couple of children. And it’s true that I didn’t finish my last 15 hours until after I’d been married quite a few years. I’ve said that repeatedly.

Links please?

I think you’re confusing me with Alte. Of course, she’s way smarter than me, LOL, so whatever.

I have never actually found this to be true. When I was a student, both in the 90s and more recently, decent paying jobs for students could always be found, even where people swore it was nothing but ‘McJobs’. Of course, one’s definition of decent paying will vary, as in low cost of living areas in America, 10-15/hr is decent paying for a part time job, while along the coasts, such work wouldn’t be, though there still were/are options to make 20-30/hr part time as a student, or even more.

I see this sort of either/or attitude the most in women. Men more typically manage to find those jobs as students and don’t end up overworked or debt-burdened nearly as often.

I know what you mean, but some of these people really get on my nerves, and I’m already heavily controlling myself, but I promise I’ll try to do better.

@ Elspeth

No, I don’t think I’m confusing you with anyone. I know that Morticia didn’t even finish highschool, and both Alte and you dropped out. Whatever though, even your clarification doesn’t make it any better.

@ A Lady

Before you jump to conclusions, I invite you to come live in Toronto, be a student and then tell me what jobs you can find. And as a FYI, the minimum wage in Ontario is already 10.25.

“One is uncommon. Two is typical. Three is not that uncommon but atypical. Four or more is rare.”
That’s pretty much middle and UMC in the UK too. I don’t know that much about LMC but I think 2 is pretty common. They tend to marry younger though.

1 child is more what people who started later (35+) have. Even amongst them, there’s quite a few 2s or even 3s.

I am not sure 4 is as rare in the UK, it’s a status marker.

So for example and I’m just using random politicians that you’d have likely heard of, someone like Ed Miliband would have the typical 2, the likes of Boris Johnson would have 4. Funnily I just wikipediaed to see if my guess was right, and it was lol.

No, I don’t think I’m confusing you with anyone.
I assure you that you are, LOL.

Whatever though, even your clarification doesn’t make it any better.

Maybe not, I’ll grant you that much. Given that our values systems are so totally different, the fact that it took me until age 31 to finally wrap it up, or that a woman of superior intelligence such as Alte doesn’t have a degree automatically makes us lesser people in your eyes. It’s kind of funny to me, though.

EscoffierIn my youth and even today we still have coming out parties (we called them deb balls). Typically the happened not at 16 but at 18, usually Christmas break of a girls first semester of college.

Maybe not, I’ll grant you that much. Given that our values systems are so totally different, the fact that it took me until age 31 to finally wrap it up, or that a woman of superior intelligence such as Alte doesn’t have a degree automatically makes us lesser people in your eyes. It’s kind of funny to me, though.

I’ll be nice to Dalrock and other commenters, and not reply to that comment or say anything about this so called “superior intelligence” lmao

I’m not sure it’s necessarily about money here, can be about Britishness etc.
It is amongst some sets though. The flasher new money sorts.
And I suppose sometimes it can be about money amongst others, e.g. oh we’re so poor all the children have handmedowns and we never have the heating on. Whilst all the time the 4 children are in expensive schools lol

If anyone is from a country or background where it’s more usual for young marrieds to live with their parents (India, South America, Philippines?), what happens in the professional classes? Do they marry whilst they are both at college or afterwards?

I am tired of arguing needlessly. I am beginning to find it the equivalent of intellectual dumpster diving. I only commented to concur with something Dalrock said and it was never my intention to start slinging insults.

Chels, I did note that cost of living is certainly a factor. 10$CAD is pretty close to 7-8$US in terms of spending power, so the minimum wage differences are trivial.

And having worked with and for Toronto-based companies on a decent paying part-time basis as a student, as well as other people I know, there’s more than McJobs out there, even in the magical fairyland of Toronto. But certainly the people in question were/are disproportionately male, which I also noted is the way of it.

If you’re talking about landscaping, construction or other physically demanding work, you’re absolutely right. However, other decent paying part time jobs are rare, and it’s incredibly hard to get them without having connections. Therefore, all that remains for the vast majority of students are McJobs (or getting OSAP).

Chels, all your protests revolve around preparing for your career. That’s it. People have had it far harder than you, many never even had parents to pay for their studies, yet they were married, worked and studied at the same time and met the needs of their significant others too. Face it, you want it all and you want it along easy street. You want both the career and the perfect man who accepts all your faults; and of course, you only want that when you’re “ready”.

Chels ask yourself a question. Why should a man commit to you and only you if you spend your PRIME years with other men, busy with your career and losing your femininity due to “burning out” before you’re thirty years of age? Answer me that.

You can get higher-paying jobs when you’re a student that aren’t physical, especially if you live in a metropolitan area, but it does help if you have the connections which don’t necessarily have to be through family e.g. after a summer internship at that organisation.

Oh, is that why i see babymommas with 3 or 4 children, each by a different man, none of whom live with the “family”? Because they have so much money? Is that why they are at the dollar store, because they are so wealthy?

Children are now luxury consumption items, as some wag said.

There are other motivators. Some of my churchian friends have 3 or 4 or 5 children but they do not seem to consider the spawn as luxury items.

No, I’m not talking about those jobs, Chels. Stuck in binaries, you are. It’s not all BA/BS requiring jobs, nor is it is all manual labor jobs. There’s a lot of other industries, even in Toronto. But your remarks are not unusual, I have heard (again, mostly women) say the same sorts of things in other major cities as well, while the men just, um, got the jobs instead.

Lily, so why doesn’t she just get married? What’s the hold up? It would seem to me that Chels is the women that Dalrock describes perfectly. Going from monogamous relationship to monogamous relationship and upon reaching a certain age, after spending all that time on her career, studies and so on, is going to dump all that, get married to the last lad on her tour de cock and become a stay at home mom. She’s a poster child!

“Oh, is that why i see babymommas with 3 or 4 children, each by a different man, none of whom live with the “family”? Because they have so much money? Is that why they are at the dollar store, because they are so wealthy?”
No.
The US probably have something similar to what I described for the UK.
Few LMCs, MCs having more than 2 children or perhaps 3. Most likely to have 4 children are highest SES and lowest SES. I’m talking about ‘traditional’ British (not muslims etc).

But yes you also have the churchy people. We don’t really have anything like that in the UK.
When I say churchy I think of someone who goes to a church (though still usually Church of England) which is a bit ‘new fangled’, e.g. they have guitars and are ‘happy clappy’. We don’t have anything like the LDS and evangelical churches aren’t big.

Chels, all your protests revolve around preparing for your career. That’s it. People have had it far harder than you, many never even had parents to pay for their studies, yet they were married, worked and studied at the same time and met the needs of their significant others too. Face it, you want it all and you want it along easy street. You want both the career and the perfect man who accepts all your faults; and of course, you only want that when you’re “ready”.

No, they don’t revolve around my job, I haven’t even mentioned that. However, what my protests are revolving around are how am I going to pay for my rent, for my food, for my transportation, and how am I going to do it all while getting a degree? These are actually pretty responsible questions and concerns. Sure, I could have just jumped into marriage, I could have popped out a few kids by now by letting the state pay for my expenses.

As well, the majority of people, younger and older, did not go to school FT and work FT so they can marry. Heck, even my grandparents married after my grandfather was financially stable (granted, it took a lot less time back then). That has been the case for generations—get a job, and then marry.

Furthermore, you’re seriously projecting now—I already said above that I come from a culture where the norm is that everyone gets a degree, and marriage is after this is accomplished (only stupid people can’t get a degree, and they’re seriously shamed by society for it).

And the perfect man? Ha, I already have one, and he is absolutely amazing. And does it really matter if I became ready for marriage while in university, or at 25/26 after I finished my degree? 2-3 years is absolutely irrelevant in the big scheme of things.

Chels ask yourself a question. Why should a man commit to you and only you if you spend your PRIME years with other men, busy with your career and losing your femininity due to “burning out” before you’re thirty years of age? Answer me that.

Well, like Lily was saying, I already have a man and we are planning on getting married. Now moving on—he’s the first man I’ve ever been with, so it’s not like I’m sleeping around while waiting for Prince Charming to arrive. Secondly, my job is at the bottom of my priority list; however, I do value my education (biiiig difference). Thirdly, only in the manosphere would a 30 year old woman be considered basically a leper.

Chels, you simply don’t belong to a sustainable culture. Delaying fertility is a real problem that can’t be handwaved away because it’s working ok right now. By definition, it simply cannot hold that women waiting until 30 have enough kids enough times to keep up the facade. Either women will scale back so that earlier marriage is an option without losing status, or they will see their class shrink to nothing, replaced by a more fertile class with different social norms and rules.

Well Chels, I wish you luck. If what you say is true, then I don’t really have a problem with you at all. I would just like to add that you do have a huge amount to say about your career prospects for someone whose career is at the bottom of their priority list.

Also, FWIW, it is a valuable thing to have a cohort of women who demonstrate delaying gratification, even if what they are pursuing is, ultimately, somewhat frivolous. Accomplishments are valuable markers for a man seeking a wife, if the wife demonstrates a record of achieving them. I do think it is not useful to dispute this, regardless of how one feels about the accomplishments in each relevant social class.

Chels, you simply don’t belong to a sustainable culture. Delaying fertility is a real problem that can’t be handwaved away because it’s working ok right now. By definition, it simply cannot hold that women waiting until 30 have enough kids enough times to keep up the facade. Either women will scale back so that earlier marriage is an option without losing status, or they will see their class shrink to nothing, replaced by a more fertile class with different social norms and rules.

It doesn’t matter what age people are getting married, our overall culture is not sustainable. It’s not like the people who are getting married earlier are having more kids than the ones who marry later. As well, a woman over 30 can still have at least 2 kids, which is at replacement levels.

The people getting married earlier are having more kids, actually. And long-term hormonal birth control use does affect fertility, as do the increasingly common micronutrient deficiencies among Western women who work indoors all day and eat nutrient-depleted foods. Starting after 30 by no means guarantees 2 children, though certainly it is not improbable or unusual, particularly given UMC willingness to use ART, but relying on ART is also not sustainable, for obvious reasons.

Replacement levels are misleading, you need more than 2 because some people will die very young. You really need an average of something like 2.3- 2.5 to ensure continued population stability.

“So, how many children do each of these wonderful, intact, marriages at 30 produce?”

One is uncommon. Two is typical. Three is not that uncommon but atypical. Four or more is rare.

One thing which I don’t think is given much consideration is the probability that the woman will become infertile by the time they try to conceive. The page I linked to in the OP charts this out. Only 3% of women in their early 20s are infertile. By their late 20s this jumps to 5%, and by early 30s it is up to 8%. If you marry around 30, unless you are in a hurry to start having kids that last bracket is the most relevant one. 8% doesn’t sound very high, but I would suspect that very few here would be willing to go without insurance for something with a significant financial cost which occurred 8% of the time.

Lily, I am 25 years of age. There are a couple big reasons I am not married yet. One would be the current legal system. Doesn’t do me much good to marry unless I am very, very certain about the woman herself. Secondly, trying to find the woman who isn’t placing her career at the top of her to do list, is very hard to find, due to my current location. Which ties in with my third reason. I am currently living in a very liberal city, due to my work requirements. And yes I know, people will come down hard on me for having a career and not being married. I am not going to make
excuses for that. I tried to find someone whom would want to get married young, didn’t happen and therefore I made do and got a degree in finance and accounting went further and did my law degree. It is also very hard to discuss these issues with women, face to face, they don’t respond well to put it mildly. It’s a learning curve for me I guess, nobody taught me how the current dynamic works between the sexes. I was taught one thing, that worked for my parents and their parents before them, but the social dynamic changed and I found myself not willing to enter a situation that disgusted me. Still haven’t stopped trying though.

One of the reasons I found this site was due to being completely disgusted with the current legal arrangement. It really doesn’t do one any good to live in a liberal city whilst studying and working. The environment is a killer for a conservative like me. However, there are very good reasons for staying here. This is South Africa we are talking about and the Western Cape is the safest province to live in. I do go up north every now and again to visit family and friends but it’s hardly enough time to invest in a relationship that could become marriage.

If you have a problem with that, I’m sorry, I didn’t create the problem, nor do I pretend to know all the solutions. One of the reasons I am angry with feminists is because their processes actually destroy people’s lives, both men and women, by creating rifts between the sexes that lead to serious longer term consequences.

I have just been studying the chart that Dalrock links at 2.17 showing rates of infertiility against rates of likelihood of pregnancy: The two lines cross at what to me looks like the age of 42; after that infertility is a higher percentage than likelihood of pregnancy. I was wondering, seeing that the classic EatPrayLove age seems to be 42, whether there is some correlationbetween these two facts – a denial of the inevitable? EatPrayLove appears to me to be as common at 42 for the unhaaapily married as for the unhaaapy (though never to be admotted) single-career woman.

Athol Kay has a post about female mid life crisis, and it essentially correlates with the final stage of a woman’s fertility. This would I think be a few years younger however than the window you are talking about, but still along the same lines. As for EPL, the sales pitch for divorce seems to be primarily targeted at women who are older, but the actual divorce rates per 1,000 married women by age show that divorce rates drop dramatically as women age. The media is creating a false impression that middle age women are divorcing in droves. This is particularly cruel given what the AARP study found occurs to women who divorce in their 40s.

The trend shows that women are waiting until they are older to start having children, and in the next year I would be interested to know what the current stats are. Women of higher educational status are more likely to delay childbearing, versus women of lower educational status. That’s the difference between a Ph.D. and a high school education, or a Bachelor’s even.

There are marked differences depending on what state you live in, if you’re in the U.S. I noticed the older ages of women were associated with states that have more colleges, hence the culture of obtaining higher education.

I haven’t read Athol Kay’s piece. What I think we can agree on (and it certainly ties in with my personal observations) is that the desire to go EatPrayLove correlates broadly with a woman’s loss of fertility (either about to lose it – or just lost it).

If I may repeat, in terms, what I wrote on Roissy’s a few days a ago – and I do so partly because it went down rather well; but it is pertinent – ‘Women may complain about male attention, but what really upsets them is male rejection’. EPL is a last and rather desparate attempt to secure attention, and from a man usually old enough to be their son ‘Mirror Miror on the wall’. A comment by someone else on Roissy yesterday was revealing: The Commenter had met a woman in a Bar and she had told him that she had two illegitimate children. To her face, he told her he did not date BabyMommas and moved off. Shortly thereafter a bouncer approached him asking him to leave the Bar as he had been sexually harassing a woman. I have had similar experiences, from giving both genuine put downs and unintended ones, I regret to say. Women cannot stand rejection (of any sort) and usually in my experience will treat a rejection as an unwanted approach – real Hamster spinning. As a friend of mine said to me last night, as we were discussing the same subject, and he said that he knew a couple of EPL women, ‘men smirk at them- but behind their backs’. (For the Operatically challenged I seriously recommend Hoffmansthal’s Libretto for Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier which concerns the Forty Five year old Marschallin and her seventeen year old lover Octavian. Hoffmansthal gets it absolutely right.)

Men never having been pedestalised (unless they have the looks and charm of a Casanova) do not suddenly find that they are invisible to the opposite sex and do not in any case have a cut-off point of fertility. The tailing off of Divorce (as in the chart you linked) corresponds with an acknowledgement that their SMV is gone and thus Hypergamy is not really a possibility, I would say.

Possibly the tail off in female-initiated divorce is post menopause, life must be a lot calmer without the fluctuating hormones every month.

It does drop a bit more dramatically after 45-49, but it is still a surprisingly constant trend across age brackets. You would think given all of the claims of husbands dumping older wives for younger models and the breathless claims of older wives deciding to relish their freedom that we would see at least a small spike at some point, but no such spike is there.

You note that “Older women are less likely to divorce” (true from what I have read). Yet the drift of your argument suggests that (quality) women should marry younger. Do you think the other factors–high IQ, sane, virgin, intact home–will take care of the youth drag? That is, if you have those other factors, there is no or less danger of divorce from mere youth?

My own guess is the increased risk of divorce for younger wives would still hold. However, this “cost” would need to be weighed against the benefit of having a younger/hotter wife during those first more risky years*. The reason older women divorce less appears to be that they have fewer options to remarry if they divorce. So this basically comes down to whether it is worth marrying a less desirable woman to have less risk of divorce. I haven’t seen anyone else even note the statistics on this, let alone address some of these questions however. The researchers seem to either be afraid of the topic or have a massive blind spot for it.

The other open question would seem to be what is the benefit from marrying a younger virgin vs a 30 year old who is extremely unlikely to be a virgin. Per the Social Pathologist’s data even one additional partner prior to the husband dramatically reduces the wife’s marital satisfaction. However, here we run into the basic problem that much of what we are measuring correlates very strongly with class & IQ. UMC women would be too small a portion of the sample to drive the results. It may well be that higher IQ was driving the marital satisfaction curve for example, and since higher IQ women have better future time orientation and impulse control it appeared that partner count was the driving issue. I think we have some theoretical reasons to believe that partner count would still be important on its own however.

*For the man marrying younger even if it didn’t come with an increased risk of divorce per year it would still increase his lifetime risk of experiencing divorce since he would be exposed for more years. However, if one assumes that being married is a benefit delaying marriage in this case is also questionable. There is also the option for the man to marry later but marry a somewhat younger woman. Here he would have only the increased risk which comes from having a more desirable wife.

In the end, D, as you have written, it all comes down to the character of the wife you choose. There are no guarantees that her character won’t change, and no guarantees that hubby assessed correctly. But that’s the name of the game. Statistics and probability distributions are very interesting and they have a lot to say about “the whole” but they can’t tell you much about individual cases.

The other open question would seem to be what is the benefit from marrying a younger virgin vs a 30 year old who is extremely unlikely to be a virgin. Per the Social Pathologist’s data even one additional partner prior to the husband dramatically reduces the wife’s marital satisfaction
It would be interesting to know how many partners the male spouse had. And any other major factors, e.g. if majority were LDS or similar churches.

Well…Escoffier is now saying that risks exist (which may, or may not, be a change of mind), I am tempted to see it as progress (call me an optimist)

He’s still not saying, “Don’t marry! it’s a trap for a man”, it still sounds like he sees marriage that could be a reasonably good idea.

Personnally, I disagree. I still think that the sooner a real marriage strike bites, the sooner society might start to address the problems men have with marriage and working life at the moment. Until then, enouraging men to marry looks suspiciously like pushing them under the bus…YMMV

I have said maybe a dozen times since I started posting here that I agree with every single word of Dalrock’s “How to choose a wife” posts. If you can find a girl like that AND you want to get married, then get married. If you can’t find one, OR if you don’t want to get married, then don’t.

I do think marriage can be great. I’m happy. Dalrock is happy. Athol Kay is happy. I know lots of happily married men, as well. So it works out for some of us.

I am, or was, skeptical of the general view here that worthy women are as rare as rubies. They are, however, apparently much rarer than I would have thought, which is depressing, but the truth is often depressing. I am far enough removed from the scene that I have no firsthand experience of the current market. So I have go on hearsay. Where there is so, so much smoke there must be some fire, hence I am quite willing to believe much of the pessimism that pervades here (and elsewhere).

If I were starting over, and found game at a young age, knowing what I know now, I am not sure what I would do. I can see the base-level appeal of screwing a lot of women for years on end. But I can also see that the end-game is likely to be rather sad. One of the old folk-wisdom reasons for getting married was “So you don’t end up old, sad, alone and pathetic.” This WILL be the end for most PUAs and gamers. Advantage: marriage and family. I probably would not do anything different.

It’s sad. I feel bad for all of you and I am morose about the prospects for my country, or “more” morose, since I was already morose about that.

As I suspected, Escofier and I have pretty similar views of the situation…

I don’t wish for the marriage strike for any reason EXCEPT that I see it as the only way that the vast majority of women will be made to ‘man up’ and help make a better society. I do not believe that any easy measures will do anything to fix things, it needs to be drastic and painful (there will be many women left with cats, because they’ve permanently poisoned many men against legal commitment). Women have de-pedestalised themselves by showing what they’ll do when not shamed into ethical, moral behaviour. Slut walks? Proud to be a slut? FRA and FDV used for divorce tactics?

I think that men can be happier single than women can (speaking in averages), I think that women will bear the most hurt, but then they just sat back and let things get this bad because they liked the short term gains and fail to see (even now) the long term pain.

As far as I can tell Escoffier and I are of the same mind on the question of if/when men should marry. I think where he may have come around is regarding what social pressures/moral judgments should exist for men who don’t marry, and specifically for those who don’t marry and don’t follow the serial monogamy model. To the extent that he has changed his view after hearing other’s arguments I would take this as a credit to him. Very few people are willing to change their opinions on this kind of issue.

@Just1x

He’s still not saying, “Don’t marry! it’s a trap for a man”, it still sounds like he sees marriage that could be a reasonably good idea.

Personnally, I disagree. I still think that the sooner a real marriage strike bites, the sooner society might start to address the problems men have with marriage and working life at the moment. Until then, enouraging men to marry looks suspiciously like pushing them under the bus…YMMV

I’m not looking to talk men or women into marriage. What I think we would both agree on is that men need to be better warned of the legal risks and the lack of social/moral support they can expect for their marriage (especially from the church). I agree that real change won’t happen until women perceive a cost in their odds of marrying as a result of having stacked the legal and social deck in their favor. Where I disagree is I don’t think men should sacrifice their own lives in an effort to create this kind of change. There would be plenty of pressure on women if men simply acted in their own best interest; given a roughly 50% divorce rate there are far too many women being given the honor of marriage who don’t deserve it.

I do not believe that any easy measures will do anything to fix things, it needs to be drastic and painful (there will be many women left with cats, because they’ve permanently poisoned many men against legal commitment). Women have de-pedestalised themselves by showing what they’ll do when not shamed into ethical, moral behaviour. Slut walks? Proud to be a slut? FRA and FDV used for divorce tactics?

Some of the pain you describe is already accruing, but the media either ignores it or outright lies about it. There is a long running trend of women finding it harder and harder to remarry after divorce. The stats women are being given are wildly inaccurate, and for some reason the researchers have recently lost all interest in the topic. Wave one of the spinster revolution is here, they are just of the post marital variety. Wave two may well be of the never married type.

I do not now and have never held the view that men are obligated to marry anyone. (Though I wonder what people here would say about the following scenario. Suppose a guy is in a LTR with a girl who wants to marry him but he keeps putting it off and then she gets pregnant. Is he obligated?)

The one thing that I have said that has everyone mad at me is the PUA lifestyle is immoral. Well, yell away. It is. Saying that does not imply, much less demand, that corresponding female behavior is not immoral or less immoral, but that is how many people took it. Why, I don’t know.

Anyway, this is am important practical issue because if you are going to discourage men to get married, then you either have to adjust your view of the morality of non-marital sex or expect/demand male celibacy. Leaving aside the realism of such an expectation, that’s the issue. It’s abstract because men, the ones who can, aren’t going to stop no matter what anyone says. But it’s practical because the fix for the problem is inherently tied to what morality we as a society advocate, expect, and (try to) practice.

I find interesting Dalrock’s Leninist “Worse is better” arguement, let the pain caused by the PUAs lead to enough female WTF?? moments that the girls reassess en masse. I would also throw out that, according to Aristotle, “natural right is changeable.” So perhaps in the current enviornment casual sex is NOT immoral. That’s what most of you want to believe.

I’ve been married for 30 years, raised a son, now 22. I have had a very good marriage.

Boys, can we talk? Marriage as such is not the issue; having a family is. Until you have kids, divorce is a mathematical issue. OK someone is hurt, but the marriage ain’t worth it unless both want it.But kids get hurt, and it ain’t there fault. having kids is the “bright line” in this discussion.

I get the sense with many that being single is a state sort of like acne, and you need the “Clearisil” of marriage to clean it up. It ain’t so. It may surprise you that, as guy who has had a good marriage, I would not recommend it to any of you UNLESS you want kids. Those of you who want kids can leave the discussion now; I have nothing more to say to you. Oh yes I do; Kids are a one way street. All give-no “get”. Kids expect you to work your ass off to provide everything they want because that is what parents do. Do not expect the SLIGHTEST expression of honest appreciation until they turn, at minimum, 45 years old, if then. My son is a great kid but he is like that and so are everyone of his friends, all middle class (I talk to their parents; actully we commiserate).Expect ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in return for your sacrifice except sullen exhortations to give them more. Now you can go; go with God-trust me, you’ll need Him. Oh and another thing before you go-the idea that kids will take care of you in old age? Where the hell do you think these nursing homes sprang from? Every one in them thought their kids would take care of them as in let them stay at in their home, looking in on them, etc.. Nah-if you get that way your kids will wisk you off to a “home”, sell your house and contents and all your belongings, and eagerly await your demise so they can split whatever’s left if they don’t slip in and actually hasten it with a well placed pillow over your face. You’ll get a while to rot in your own shit and piss because the moronic staff they hire at these hell holes could honesly not give a shit (literally) if you die; in fact, it’s better if you do because then the corpse valets from the funeral home have to clean your miserable ass up. See ya’!

Now, for those remaining, what the fuck is the matter with you? If you do not want kids why would you ever consider getting married? The only possible reason is you’re a 5, she’s a 10, and somehow you hookedup and she’s into you enough to want an LTR as in marriage. If she wants kids-re-read above. If she says she doesn’t want kids, still re-read it. She’ll change. You’ll have kids.

Every kid you have takes you AT LEAST one peg down the Lifestyle Ladder. Allow me to expalin. Let’s say you and your wife earn combined $100,000. Now, you have 1 kid. She either stays home or you hire daycare; subtract $7,000 off the top (conservative-if she actually quits, it’s much worse). Them be after tax dollars dude; that’s like taking the skin ff your dick to make a wallet-it’ll hurt my young friend. College fund? OUCH! Increased medical costs ‘cuz you’ve got a 20% deductible-YOW! With each of these the new BMW becomes a (very) used Subaru station wagon, nights out become Kentucky Fried Chicken, in, Aruba become nowhere.

Next kid-DOWN YOU GO!

If you really don’t want kids, and really want yoru freedom, amn up and get vasectomy now. This will separate the wheat from the chaff. I knwo; my wife didnt want kid either, and that lasted 8 years. Had I said before that (after getting married) “Ok Honey,I think I should get a vas” she’d have said “No wait”. BTW undoing a vas is an 8-0 hour operation on your johnson-and guess what I’ve known 2guys who did it for their cunt second wifes who insisted on it. Keep the power–VAS NOW!

That’s my advice. Feel free to take it or ignore it. I fyou do ignore it, please cut, paste and retain para. #3 so in later eyars you can read it and say “Munson was right goddamnit I wish I had listened to him”. Don’t wait until the nursing home van arrives-by then it’ll be too late.

I think that a marriage strike is quite unlikely — most men want relationships with women, and cohabiting ones, and in the US at least the norm for those remains marriage. What I can see happening is a continued decline in marriage among the lower economic classes, with the higher economic classes perhaps slowly moving away from marriage towards a more European approach of long-term cohabitation and children sometimes resulting in marriage later on, and sometimes not. I still think this is not likely to be a very strong trend among those SES levels in the US for some time, due to the significant social cache that marriage still holds in that SES bracket (something which also serves to tamp down divorce rates there).

I do think that you are going to see marriage statistics overall deteriorate, however, because I don’t see a real revival for marriage among the lower SES brackets any time soon — and, as Dalrock has noted, the remarriage market has tightened a lot, with both men and women remarrying less frequently than in prior decades.

The strategy for MRAs has to be on changing laws on the margins and incrementally. A dreamed “marriage strike” isn’t really going to happen — people may not be getting married in many SES segments (and that is already happening), but this isn’t a strike, it’s just that people are living together and/or having kids without being married. As long as these are benefited (and to some degree they are, especially in the lower SES sets), the impact of not having marriages on any desire to change the family law will be very minimal.

While it’s true that the Kate Bolicks of the world get a lot of attention by means of the strong bullhorn they wield, nevertheless, almost all people by her age either are or have been married. Again, I expect that to decrease somewhat, but not because of a marriage “strike”, but rather a more general trend towards long-term cohabitation in-lieu-of-marriage in all SESs, with it being least pronounced, or perhaps slower to deploy there in as fulsome a way.

I find interesting Dalrock’s Leninist “Worse is better” arguement, let the pain caused by the PUAs lead to enough female WTF?? moments that the girls reassess en masse. I would also throw out that, according to Aristotle, “natural right is changeable.” So perhaps in the current enviornment casual sex is NOT immoral. That’s what most of you want to believe.

My approach is the opposite of Leninist. I say let women demand all they will, just don’t force men into the changed agreement. The market will correct. Likewise if a labor union wants to double wages, I’m not going to force business to hire the same number of workers. Something has to give. SoCons have been the enforcers making men not respond to the changing bargain feminists have pushed through. All I’m saying is stop doing that.

Wouldn’t “a more general trend towards long-term cohabitation in-lieu-of-marriage in all SESs” constitute a de facto marriage strike? Because, if you’re living together but refuse to tie the knot (esp. if the man is the one saying no), you have to have a reason and the reason is likely to be either “Because I want to be able to get out of this as pain-free and low cost as possible” or else “If you decide to ditch me, I want my downside exposure to be absolutely minimal.”

I had a feeling you would say that. I didn’t mean that you actual program has anything to do with Lenin’s actual methods. Only that your argument about the PUAs and the SMP and his argument about the elites and the economy are the same. “Worse is better” means, the worse things get for the average people, the more pissed they get, the more the pressure for change builds, the sooner the revolution comes.

Hence, PUAs who spread pain are helping hasten the overturn of the current system.

Wouldn’t “a more general trend towards long-term cohabitation in-lieu-of-marriage in all SESs” constitute a de facto marriage strike? Because, if you’re living together but refuse to tie the knot (esp. if the man is the one saying no), you have to have a reason and the reason is likely to be either “Because I want to be able to get out of this as pain-free and low cost as possible” or else “If you decide to ditch me, I want my downside exposure to be absolutely minimal.”

Usually those aren’t the reasons, however. Usually it’s either (1) not “having the money to get married” (i.e., where marriage is assumed to require money to acquire property and so on from the start, rather than someone moving into someone else’s apartment) — common among the lower SES segments or (2) both are left-libs who see marriage as a social construct/trap. Sure, there are guys who are cohabiting with women and stringing them along somewhat in refusing to marry them, but that’s really more about not wanting to marry a specific person. In the higher SES in the US, most of these guys will eventually marry someone — so it’s not really like they’re on strike against marriage, but they may not want to marry Jane when he is 26.

A marriage strike is really where a large number of guys actually *never* get married specifically because of the risks of marriage. I see no large trend in this area, and I don’t see it developing soonish among the upper SES in the US, either.

I would measure a marriage strike in terms of the percentage of women who are able to marry, not the percent of men who marry. However, if the more desirable potential husbands are the ones who are refusing this would increase the impact.

I would measure a marriage strike in terms of the percentage of women who are able to marry, not the percent of men who marry.

Agree. Recalling Baumeister’s work, a clear plurality of men historically have not reproduced, but 80% of women have. So any hypothetical marriage strike would be seen, as all other things are, in terms of “how women are affected”. Evidence of this is simple: marriage 2.0 has existed arguably for over 20 years, but only now that the middle class women are finding it a tad more difficult to marry when they decide it’s time, is there any sort of “crisis”.

However, if the more desirable potential husbands are the ones who are refusing this would increase the impact.

For what definition of desirable?

As the financial crisis, the debt-berg as some call it, continues to grind away, the beta traits of fidelity and reliability may well become much more desirable to women. But not yet, so far as I can tell, not yet.

I would measure a marriage strike in terms of the percentage of women who are able to marry, not the percent of men who marry.

Why? It would be possible, for example, for the marital activity of men to become more concentrated on more desirable women, in repeat marriages, which could result in a false positive for being a marriage strike even when most men are marrying. That seems like a counter-intuitive way to define something as a “strike”. If high percentages of men are marrying, even if a higher percentage of women are unable to marry, this isn’t a strike, but a concentration of the marital activity of men in a somewhat smaller group of women.

EscoffierI am, or was, skeptical of the general view here that worthy women are as rare as rubies. They are, however, apparently much rarer than I would have thought, which is depressing, but the truth is often depressing. I am far enough removed from the scene that I have no firsthand experience of the current market.

While it is good of you to finally admit that you don’t really know as much as you have previously claimed to, you might want to reflect on just how arrogant it is to talk down to men, some of whom are right in the middle of the modern social scene, and hand out advice that simply is wrong. You still come across as a mini-me version of Bill Bennett, who has plenty of time to dump all over men, and no clue about the women those men have to deal with. It looks a whole lot like tolerating, or even defending, bad behavior by women. And while you say over and over again that you don’t think that way, in my experience SoCons who say that in the general case some how never quite can get around to dealing with specific cases of bad behavior by women.

“It goes without saying” doesn’t work. There have been far too many other SoCons over the last 5, 10, 15, 20 or more years who have excused away, or tolerated, or even defended bad behavior by women – this is why any SoCon is going to be expected to be just another “white knight” who can’t bring himself to, oh, point out in his church that babymommas should be strongly criticized, or tell his wife “no” on anything at all.

And if you want a specific example: search this site for Dalrock’s article on Mary Winkler. Reflect on the fact that two groups of people defended her, some to the point of basically a virtual tongue bath: feminists and trad/socons. SoCons like you are therefore going to be assumed to be among her defenders, until proven otherwise. So “it goes without saying”, again, doesn’t work. It has to be said, if you expect men to take you seriously.

I think what is going on here is, first, many of you have no clear definition of what a SoCon is, and second, since nothing even close to what you consider a SoCon to be has ever posted here, you don’t have any chances to actually heckle one to his face (anonymously on the Internet, but still), a prospect you clearly relish.

So all it took was for me to say (on a blog written by a married Christian, ironically) “the PUA lifestyle is immoral” and some of you lept for joy. “Here is our chance finally to throw tomatoes at a real live SoCon, rather than just railing from afar at Bennett, who will never even become aware of our existence.”

Since it’s all virtual and anonymous, have at it, the tomatoes won’t stain my clothes. To the extent that you want to have a real conversation, refine your ideas, learn something for yourselves, teach something to others, and actually influence the intellectual culture, it’s a waste of time and energy, however emotionally satisfying it may be.

Once again, to be clear, not talking about Dalrock (or Brendan, or several others).

Why? It would be possible, for example, for the marital activity of men to become more concentrated on more desirable women, in repeat marriages, which could result in a false positive for being a marriage strike even when most men are marrying. That seems like a counter-intuitive way to define something as a “strike”. If high percentages of men are marrying, even if a higher percentage of women are unable to marry, this isn’t a strike, but a concentration of the marital activity of men in a somewhat smaller group of women.

The example of the false positive you suggest is one of the reasons it is appropriate to focus on women and not men. If the same number of men were still marrying a smaller number of women, the intended pressure of the strike would be felt. Right now young white women in the US expect that they are all but guaranteed the chance to marry based on the 90% ever married results of their older sisters. Take this from 90% expected to 80% actual and this will have a cultural impact. Take it down to 70% actual and that impact would be I think quite large. Likewise, 100% of US men could still marry but marry women from overseas. This would still be perceived as a marriage strike by US women (so long as they weren’t able to marry). To some degree the strike would also be felt in terms of quality as well as quantity. I think this has to be the case for the remarriage strike already for example. Given the very low remarriage rates and the headwind older women face in the SMP, those who do remarry likely are often digging fairly deep to be able to do so.

Wouldn’t “a more general trend towards long-term cohabitation in-lieu-of-marriage in all SESs” constitute a de facto marriage strike? Because, if you’re living together but refuse to tie the knot (esp. if the man is the one saying no), you have to have a reason and the reason is likely to be either “Because I want to be able to get out of this as pain-free and low cost as possible” or else “If you decide to ditch me, I want my downside exposure to be absolutely minimal.”

I think this is accurate. I would also add the lost status which women who marry receive. The value of this status would also increase if marriage went fairly quickly from an expected right of womanhood to somewhat scarce.

“Before I barely had enough money to pay for food,” said McGonagall. “After using Match.com I found I wasn’t going into debt anymore.”

McGonagall started eating out five nights a week using a rotation of different guys she met through the dating site. McGonagall kept things simple—no more than five dates with the same guy.

[D: Great find. Perfect illustration of who bears the searching costs, and why men should refrain from paying them unless they are in a special situation (a young woman they know is a virgin and isn’t dating other men, for example).]

EscoffierI think what is going on here is, first, many of you have no clear definition of what a SoCon is,

Suppose you define it for us, oh all-knowing-one.

and second, since nothing even close to what you consider a SoCon to be has ever posted here,

Why do you believe this to be true, oh all-knowing-one?

you don’t have any chances to actually heckle one to his face (anonymously on the Internet, but still), a prospect you clearly relish.

See, this sort of pompous ignorance makes it very difficult to take you seriously; I’m thinking that you’re just another concern-troll again who simply seeks endless disputation while pretending to be in a furrowed-brow “debate”.

So all it took was for me to say (on a blog written by a married Christian, ironically) “the PUA lifestyle is immoral” and some of you lept for joy.

Don’t you ever get tired of this strawman? It’s not as if it hasn’t been debunked a few times in the last month or so.

Isn’t it interesting that once again, a social conservative is presented with a clear example of bad behavior by a woman in the form of Mary Winkler, and once again he just looks the other way? If you, Escoffier, want to know why some men utterly despise White Knights, this is why.

Some people don’t much care for murderers — unless they are women. Then it’s “different”, eh, Escoffier?

BrendanA marriage strike is really where a large number of guys actually *never* get married specifically because of the risks of marriage. I see no large trend in this area, and I don’t see it developing soonish among the upper SES in the US, either.

What if more American men start marrying overseas women? From the perspective of American women, that would be a “marriage strike”. And, as even Escoffier notes, if some growing number of men refuse to marry , but rather demand cohabitation instead, that will also count.

Should cohabitation in lieu of marriage spread from the middle class to the upper middle class, I expect to see demands for laws to recognize those living arrangements as de-facto marriage in cases of separation. Call it “palimony”, call it “common law marriage 2.0”, or something else, but I’ll expect it in the legislatures or the Congress. Such a law would be supported by the usual suspects: feminists and their SoCon ankle-biting lapdogs..

The example of the false positive you suggest is one of the reasons it is appropriate to focus on women and not men. If the same number of men were still marrying a smaller number of women, the intended pressure of the strike would be felt.

But calling that a strike is a real misnomer. It could just as easily be characterized as a strike by the “left out” women who do not want to marry the rest of the men — in other words, an outgrowth of hypergamy, rather than any marriage-avoiding behavior on the part of men.

What if more American men start marrying overseas women? From the perspective of American women, that would be a “marriage strike”. And, as even Escoffier notes, if some growing number of men refuse to marry , but rather demand cohabitation instead, that will also count.

So, do you think that European men are on a long-term “marriage strike”, given the high rates of cohabitation and low (compared to the US) rates of marriage? What about the women in Europe? Are they all pining to be married, but only are cohabiting because the men refuse to marry and are striking from marriage? Based on what I’ve seen in Europe, that isn’t the case, but maybe one of our European commenters can comment on that.

As for marrying non-U.S. women, that isn’t a marriage strike — you’re still getting married. It’s a strike against marrying American women — which is really more like a boycott of American women than a strike against marriage (because you’re still married).

I know it seems like I’m being a stickler, but I’m really not. The word “strike” has a very specific meaning. If it is being suggested that men are on a “marriage strike” and yet they are still getting married to foreign women, or most men are still eventually getting married to U.S. women (as is the case now for most guys who cohabit), that isn’t really a “strike”. Avoiding marrying Jane 26 when you’re 28 and getting married to Jenny 32 when you’re 35 doesn’t mean you were on a marriage strike when you were 28. I’m certain there is a small, hardcore group of guys who are deadset against marriage, period, and are on strike against it. But it’s a very small group.

The only identifiable “SoCon”–according to your own definition, not mine–position that I have stated is “What PUAs do is immoral.” I have stated that my reasons for believing that are based on natural right, not social conservatism, which tends to be based on religion. I have enough experience with people who consider themselves SoCons to know that many of them are actually quite hostile to natural right. Dalrock himself, whom you might call an “enlightened” or “illusion free” SoCon, has denied the existence of natural right.

BTW, you don’t seem to know what a “straw man” is. Oh, and I also oppose murder–again, based on my understanding of natural right.

I am as So/Con as they come. I thump my bible, believe in hetro marriage only, I think PUA’s are cads, hate drugs, find the gay lifestyle repulsive, blah blah…
BUT…in the game of sex, women are the gatekeepers of virtue. If her legs aren’t spread, he’s not getting any…PERIOD! So if there is a moral breakdown, quit blaming smooth talking men and start pointing fingers at trampy women.
As for marriage, I truly believe in the traditional concept….but I’m a realist first. When I found out how easy it was to score, all of my delusions of womanly virtue evaporated. As I look around me, my former neutral opinion of women has been beaten to a pulp by the words and actions of the average American gal…hell, I was parked in front of my daughters high school a few hours ago, waiting to pick her up, and located rather close to a bus stop…OMG!!! The foul mouth tramps throwing themselves at the guys would make a hooker blush.
In the current America, only a fool would get married unless for religious commitment (my case). I know lots of guys ( I dare say the majority of my married friends) who only stay married because “it’s cheaper to keep her”. If I found myself single tomorrow there is no way I’d get married again. I would find some gal, promise fidelity (and mean it) but I would not enter into a legally binding contract that makes me a loser from the second the ink dries. I would most likely insist on separate residences too. The Lord calls us Christians to be “wise as serpents”, until the law is corrected, marriage for a man is a legal/financial suicide pact.

BrendanSo, do you think that European men are on a long-term “marriage strike”, given the high rates of cohabitation and low (compared to the US) rates of marriage? What about the women in Europe? Are they all pining to be married, but only are cohabiting because the men refuse to marry and are striking from marriage? Based on what I’ve seen in Europe, that isn’t the case, but maybe one of our European commenters can comment on that.

I don’t know anything about European marriage/divorce laws, so I really can’t answer the questions. At a guess, the marriage rates are declining as much due to the huge social welfare pillows over there as anything else. But it’s only a guess.

As for marrying non-U.S. women, that isn’t a marriage strike — you’re still getting married. It’s a strike against marrying American women — which is really more like a boycott of American women than a strike against marriage (because you’re still married).

Ok, so call it a boycott. Call it a green eyed, purple people eater if you want to. I don’t care about the label, only about the effects. What effects? Persuading women in the aggregate to give up Marriage 2.0. Why? Because Marriage 2.0 is having a growing corrosive, destructive effect upon the social fabric. Why do I care? Because that destructive effect is eating up a lot of men. Why does that matter? Because most of the men are betas. So what? So it’s betas that keep an industrial civilization in existence, that’s what, and there is no way women will ever take up the slack.

I know men in the oil patch. There are essentially no women on drilling rigs. Anyone who drives a car, or eats food that was transported on a truck or railway, might think about that for a while. Then magnify that across the entire complex web of the modern world. It’s the diligent, intelligent, rule-following betas who keep the electricity on, the phones working, the food on the shelves, etc. and so forth, and it’s those same betas who are more and more being punished no matter what they do. If enough of them decide to drop back to essentially subsistence, live won’t be very much fun for anyone – especially women.

Maybe the fact that women are going to suffer will get the SoCons to “man up” and actually take a stand?

Nah. Never happen. SoCons would rather see civilization crumble than say “no” to a teary eyed woman.

EscoffierThe only identifiable “SoCon”–according to your own definition, not mine–

Question: What is my definition of “SoCon”?
Question: For the second time, what is your definition of “SoCon”?

position that I have stated is “What PUAs do is immoral.”

This claim is false. Social/traditional/whatever conservatives as a general rule dislike “Game”. You came to this site with the same attitude. Therefore, an identifiable “SoCon” position that you have stated is your dislike of “Game”. I really think you should do a better job of remembering your own positions taken, especially when they aren’t all that old. You also stated that you don’t like hypergamy – which demonstrated a lack of knowledge of the topic – another hobbyhorse that SoCons like to ride.

I have stated that my reasons for believing that are based on natural right, not social conservatism, which tends to be based on religion.

And what is your definition of social conservatism, again?

I have enough experience with people who consider themselves SoCons to know that many of them are actually quite hostile to natural right. Dalrock himself, whom you might call an “enlightened” or “illusion free” SoCon, has denied the existence of natural right.

So what?

BTW, you don’t seem to know what a “straw man” is.

BTW, I do know what the straw man fallacy is, and you’ve used it more than once. In fact it is one of the fallacies that you seem to be very fond of.

Oh, and I also oppose murder–again, based on my understanding of natural right.

I don’t believe you. I believe that you are quite willing to excuse women who murder. Prove me wrong.

A strike is when a unionised group of workers decide by vote to no longer perform work or otherwise honour the contract they entered into with an employer. It seems rather pointless to deconstruct any deeper meaning of the word when used in the context of marriage rates in a society, as it could only ever stand as the very loosest type of analogy in the first place.
If less females in a society are becoming, or have the potential to become, married, and if this is condition follows (to an extent) from the reactionary response from the males of that society to those females, then the original analogy could be said to correct in it’s intent to convey that message.

How can my own claim about what I believe be “false”? Either you can read minds (I doubt this, for the record), or else you think you have ferreted out some hidden implication of my thinking that I have missed. If the latter, then I repeat what I said earlier. Please show me so I can correct my thinking. I do not want, even unwittingly, to be in error on such important subjects.

A “straw man” is a phony argument concocted by party A and imputed to party B because it is easy for party A to refute. E.g., what you do to me. What I engaged in is called “speculation.” This is different. “Specutlation” is when party A is mystified by the strange behavior of party B and so wonders what could be causing it. E.g., when you repeatedly impute to me opinions that I not only do not hold, but that I have said over and over that I reject, I speculate as to why you do that.

I have not said no true SoCon. I have said that you people don’t know what you consider a SoCon to be, beyond that to you it is the ultimate bogeyman. I have also said that you seem to have little experience with actual SoCons, however defined, and that in the absense of such experience, you have settled on me as the ne plus ultra example since (for now) I will actually talk to you.

In the popular parlance, a SoCon is someone who believes that human behavior should be based on traditional religious teachings. Since I have not made that argument, but in fact have made altogether different arguments, the fact that you keep referring to me as a SoCon reminds me of a guy who calls an armadillo a rhinoceros when in fact he has never seen either and does not know what either one actually is.

A “straw man” is a phony argument concocted by party A and imputed to party B because it is easy for party A to refute. E.g., what you do to me. What I engaged in is called “speculation.”

You wrote this claim:The one thing that I have said that has everyone mad at me is the PUA lifestyle is immoral.

This is a strawman argument. You state that every single poster on this site got angry at you only because you called PUA’s immoral. That’s false, and I have demonstrated the falseness of the claim in the previous posting. You make up a phony argument and impute it to every other commentor and then proceed to bash it. Strawman fallacy in action.

You don’t speculate. You pontificate, and you never, ever, back up anything you say with a cited fact. You use words that you refuse to define. You misuse words that you don’t know the definition to, and never admit error. This might work in your dorm room bull sessions. It doesn’t work with adults.

Furthermore, I do not believe that you would ever criticize a women who committed murder.

On reflection, Escoffier, you might be opposed to murder in a purely theoretical, abstract manner.
My contention is this: faced with a real, live woman who has committed the deliberate crime of premeditated murder, you’d fold like a cheap paper fan.

Thus your abstraction has no application in the real world. And if you can’t bring yourself to do that, there’s no way you can bring yourself to oppose any other bad behavior by individual women, or by women in the aggregate. There’s no behavior by a woman so bad that you would not find some way to make an excuse for her, not in the real world.

This has real implications. If men can’t bring themselves to say “This action is wrong, and the woman who committed it should be punished” then there’s no real consequences for bad actions by women. It means that women are above the law. And in fact we see that in the real world much too often, with serious consequences from time to time.

OK, what do we really disagree on? I probably hate women less than you do, but beyond that? Plesae specify. It would be helpful if you took my responses at face value, or at least elaborated why you thought I was lying or self-deluded.

Escoffier
Insofaras taking on the label “SoCon” is the same as a death sentence, in these parts, you have not done enough to ensure your survival. See, it is often impossible to define exactly what a SoCon really is, precisely. But we know one when we see one. So, the best course is to mention from time to time well known SoCons (like that Bennett slug) and declare out how much you would enjoy throwing him off a cliff.
SoCons are the lowest of the low because they have the power and position to tell the truth and get away with it. Instead, they betray their fellow men because they are not really men but bearers of dried-up manginas.

So, do you think that European men are on a long-term “marriage strike”, given the high rates of cohabitation and low (compared to the US) rates of marriage? What about the women in Europe? Are they all pining to be married, but only are cohabiting because the men refuse to marry and are striking from marriage? Based on what I’ve seen in Europe, that isn’t the case, but maybe one of our European commenters can comment on that.

Well, as you know, I cannot talk about all Europe but, in my opinion, all women want commitment to a worthy man and the bigger the commitment the better. There are exceptions, but they are a tiny minority.

Traditionally, the greatest commitment was called “marriage”, but this word has been trashed by the left so, in our left-leaning Europe, some women prefer to have “de facto” marriages, which are marriages in all but the name (for example, in France, they are called “PACS”).

So, yes, all women want to get married whatever the name, but they are not thinking nonsense about Prince Charming sweeping them off their feet (so the word “pining” does not apply). Here in Europe, we leave these childish dreams for the four-year-old little girls. They are not thinking they can get a 10 when they are a 6. They are more realist. In fact, people are more grounded in reality here. Clotaire Rapaille said in “The Culture Code” that the code word for America is “dream” and I couldn’t agree more. When I lived in USA, it seemed to me that people were living in “The Mattrix” instead of in reality.

Anyway, 99% of European women want to be married (whatever the name), but here the trade-offs start. Men are more and more reluctant to sign the papers, because they know the game is against them.

So women have to make a decision: Would they accept to cohabit with a guy without the papers? What are the alternatives? Many women think that this is better than a) dump the guy or b) live in different houses, as boyfriend and girlfriend forever. So they agree to cohabit. At least, it is a step in the commitment direction.

Then women who cohabit try to save faces saying that they don’t believe in marriage (at least, until the guy proposes). But it’s a case of “sour grapes”. It does not make sense. Signing the papers gives more advantages to the woman than not signing them. Therefore, it would be illogical that women wouldn’t want to sign the papers.

In my country there is a female writer, a radical feminist, a single mother by choice, with left political ideas. She lived in the border that unites feminism with dirtiness and poor personal presentation. Anyway, she trashed marriage once and again in newspapers and novels. She said marriage was oppression.

Well, after more than a decade to do that, she found a man foolish enough to propose her. So she accepted and she moved half a country to live with her husband. The funny thing is that she felt the need to apologize to her readers, after all these years of saying that she would never get married. She said that “it made a lot of sense”, “her husband was compatible with her cat” (funny, because here there is no cliché about single women with cats) and some more nonsense. They are married now and I pity the husband: a guy who could have done better (but Europe is FULL of betas).

Escoffier, the passive-aggressive charge of misogyny does live down to my expectations of you, to be sure, but you are asking me to retype text that you’ve already clearly chosen to ignore. I don’t see the point of that.

Escoffier
No, Dworkin&Mackinnon were not SoCons. But they were no better than SoCons. They certainly deserved no more mercy than socons. Dworkin died in agony from terminal fat-poisoning. Mackinnon may be still alive; but if she is, everyone around her hates her guts by now and looks forward to sending her to hospice with a “do-not-resuscitate” firebranded across her ass.

The first posts that you made on this thread seemed reasonable; your later posts revealed your true character. I have stopped reading your posts, I skip them. You are pushing an agenda; you are not having a conversation.

You’re going to be okay; women don’t hate you. You just need to get out more, talk to them, don’t be too shy but don’t be arrogant either. I know it seems complicated, but you have to be willing to be rejected a few times to meet the right person. It gets better!

“Playing” career woman? Is this guy serious?! Nowadays, people of both genders with very rare exception have to work just to survive. (Those who are lucky enough to still have jobs are waning.) It would be nice if the mommies could stay home with the kids. But unless we were all independently wealthy, families would literally starve.

My parents did not encourage me to get an education, they demanded it. My dad barely got through high school; my mom dropped out in the 10th grade. As a result, they placed a very high value on education. They also advised me from a very early age to never rely on a man, and did not pressure me to marry. I am not quite sure what the author of this article is getting at. But I personally do not know of any women who do not work, even those with kids. They may have taken a short maternity leave immediately after their kids were born, but they went back to work as soon as they were able. I also know a number of women who earn more than their spouses, and are the main breadwinners. I am sure that the women the author is referring to are in the minority. I sure as heck don’t know any such women.

Dalrock is referring to Upper Middle Class women, those who already come from fairly well-to-do backgrounds for whom college seems like something you do to fill the span of time between graduating high school and getting married. They do not intend to fully pursue careers; they have jobs that might be career track, or actually go into professional areas like doctor or lawyer, but upon getting married and having kids, they just drop out, sometimes for years if not permanently.

This is problematic because it continues to inflate the higher ed bubble and perpetuates a job landscape based on often meaningless credentialism. It also means people who really have to work (usually men supporting families) are being denied opportunities to do so because AA and ERA policies mean so many women have to be hired to do certain jobs. This also hurts women/families because so many women in the work force depresses wages and drives inflation. You know what I’m talking about if you can relate to this statement: “It just costs so darned much to live, we have to work two jobs just to scrape by!”

Middle- and lower-middle class women sometimes work, sometimes don’t, or work part-time. In some aspects it’s about keeping up with the Joneses: how many cars do you need, do they have to be new, do your kids really need their own bedrooms, and why live in 3000 square feet when 1200 will do? If you don’t plan to have a real career, but just work for a while until kids come, I don’t think anyone takes umbrage with that. But taking up seats at university and a job for an employer, when you don’t really plan to stay that long, hurts those who are perhaps better qualified or truly need those jobs to support families instead of an ego.

I don’t want to work in the corporate world, nor do I think of my planned career in education as being that of a “career woman” — but I appreciate having the option open to me (just as a guy who decides he doesn’t want to work in that industry would, I imagine).

Before my niece and nephew came along, my sister had a great job that she loved. She made the decision to SAHM until they were in kindergarten — a decision that she never thought she’d make. She wants to return to work in another year when the youngest is in school full time, but she’s not sure whether or not she wants to get back into her old field, or get into real estate (which she has developed a recent passion for).

Just because she decided to be a mom full-time doesn’t mean that there wasn’t value to her education, or that her work had no meaning or purpose for her. I’m not implying that UMC women don’t go to college for the Mrs. or that they don’t follow along a script because they feel like they ‘have to’ or because it’s the ‘thing to do’ (or because they’re afraid they’ll be shamed if all they really want to be is a mother). Of course this happens. But there are also plenty of women (myself included!) who are very grateful for the opportunity to have a career. Not just a job, but a career: a vocation that gives our lives purpose and direction. I don’t necessarily think that’s a ‘manly’ impulse. We’re all suited to doing good works in our field of choice, whatever that may be.

“no female should be employed, or educated, if it means a qualified male must be excluded”

Thats the worse line I’ve read so far in the comments for this post. Its highly sexist and ultimately a joke. Maybe you meant MORE qualified? If so, I agree. If a man is more qualified for a position then he should get rather than it being given to not just a woman, but also another man. I wish people would learn to be more objective about things. Gender has nothing to do with it. Its the persons raw qualifications. The one thing I do appreciate about feminism 1.0 the first wave is that women have a choice now. I will say that it is a waste for a woman to go to college, take on debt, get a job to ultimately become a SAHM. Women should consider that in their long term plans.

As a young woman, I will never become a SAHM. I have nothing against I but I fully recognize its not for me. I have too much energy to just be happy with that. It would cause my brains cells to fry. Even if you add of the “incentive” of volunteering or other side jobs. It wouldn’t be challenging enough work for me. My stress-o-meter is a lot higher than most people’s and I honestly wouldn’t feel like I was contributing to the stability of my family unit if I didn’t work. What if that main income is lost? What happens when a recession sets in? People get comfortable with the lives they live for certain stretches of time. Would your SAHW be able to spring to her feet and make up for the loss of your 80K a year job? For me the risk of that is too high.

I do however agree that women do push men out of the workplace. Often, unfairly. For example, in an business environment. There are certain expectations for people who work in them. They value innovation, quick and clear thinking, objectivity, respect of hierarchy, ambition, drive, ability to work under stress and impeding deadline etc. More often than not men do better with these things. Not all men, but more likely men than women. In such environments emotions and feeling don’t matter. Most women can’t separate how they “feel” from the goal at hand so it ultimately ends up hurting the team and the organization. That being said I do think women need to assess what they would be good at and not blindly go into the wrong fields because society tells them they are “equal”. So, I think women should compete with men on a leveled playing field for jobs. If a woman doesn’t meet the standard set, she doesn’t get the job. Period. I think this way probably because I value fairness above all else.

Women ultimately need to be given the full information about all of their options. If you’re gonna stay at home, take pride in it and do a good job. If a man wants a stay at home wife/mother he needs to invest in a field that will allow him this type of lifestyle. Though, in this world, with the cost of raising children, health care, and price of education it seems that less people have the ability to be stay at home parents. I don’t think we should go back to before feminism. There were major problems with that system. As a woman, if I’m more qualified for a job I want to get it. Not because Im female, but because I deserve it. However, I will never knowingly take a job over a more qualified person. Male or female.

I think this is the blog where Dalrock invents the “feminist merit badge” meme.

Here’s two more notches on the belt in earning the FMB that I’ve thought of, at either end of women’s reproductive lives:

1) Losing your virginity before graduation — HS, college, or pro/grad school (in desperate situations). Women stay on the treadmill with the rest of their herd until they get picked off and wifed up. This is why “last one down the aisle wins” is so funny.

2) Getting to middle age and gushing about how wonderful your post- or peri-menopause hooha is: Eve Ensler’s “Vagina Monologues”, and now Naomi Wolf’s “Vagina” book. Or, for the more pedestrian, adopting the same stance or doing something EPL-esque which symbolizes the same faux nobility.

—————–

Q: “I wonder how many women are really gung-ho careerists, and how many just follow that path because marriage seems elusive, and they have no idea how motherhood will capture their hearts.” (Susan)

A: Survey says… Only 10-15% of women are traditionally masculine in their desire pretty much only to pursue education/career/work — success outside the home — with none of the typically feminine interest in kids/home/family. This group holds a disproportionate amount of power in mainstream opinion-making (media) circles. Not all are hardcore feminists; some were just tomboys who never went in for dumb girly stuff, including bitching about men.

This first group is actually outnumbered by the 25% of women who are their opposite, the pure breeders, who can think of nothing more as young women than men, having kids, and being moms. They’re literally reproductively crazy and are going to have kids no matter what. It’s their whole purpose in life at that age. Arguably, this is the group which has been worst hosed by feminism, when you include the men they’re having kids with.

The other 60-65% of women say they want some mix of kids/home/family and work/job/career outside the home. This being the majority, who can’t be happy with only one or the other, is the reason for all those infernal work-life balance articles. Some fraction of this group has been bamboozled by feminism into thinking they were escaping the worst horrors of being in the second group by behaving like the first group, when they were really pretty part of the second group all along. Lots get hung out to dry in the no-mans land between the first two groups.

Ruddyturnstone was correct on the fertility/info situation. About a third of women who are going to try and have a first child after age 30 are going to have some issue doing so. So that’s maybe another checkbox in the FMB program (#4): having your expensive fertility treatments so you can maybe have your just-in-time miracle baby. In order to pull this off, you have to be sure not to have a kid in your teens or twenties, so that’s FMB checkbox #3.

“no female should be employed, or educated, if it means a qualified male must be excluded”

Thats the worse line I’ve read so far in the comments for this post. Its highly sexist and ultimately a joke. Maybe you meant MORE qualified? If so, I agree. If a man is more qualified for a position then he should get rather than it being given to not just a woman, but also another man. I wish people would learn to be more objective about things. Gender has nothing to do with it. Its the persons raw qualifications.

FYI, SEX is the word to use. “Gender” is for people who want the laws of the universe to be plastic, when that can never be.

Look, men and women have ROLES to fill in this world, else they might as well have never been born. A man is not just a worker and potential source of sperm, but a potential father and husband. Likewise, a woman is not just a potential secretary/nurse/primary schoolteacher/affirmative-action “manager”/”scientist” hire, but a potential wife and mother. There is this concept of the whole being greater than the parts individually added up; anyone with first-hand experience of military combat units or any other all-male group understands this.

Oh, and, yes, the idea was that no woman should have a desirable school or job place if a remotely qualified man was to be excluded (presuming the man is a native-born citizen, etc.).
We’re overstuffed with lawyers, mass media, politicians, bureaucrats, regulatory compliance/HR departments, sales departments, affirmative-action outreach, advertising, fast-food and retail places, etc., so we don’t need to add any more women to those fields. In fact, a major drawdown of people employed in those areas in general, especially of women, is what we need. That would free up women to go be traditional wives and SAH mothers, not just producing (and properly raising) the next generation, but also motivating the men to go be fully productive over long periods in the economy. And, as men’s and women’s roles again became more contrasting, women would find more men met their hypergamous standards; win-win for individuals, and for the continuance of the nation. (Yes, this works this way; we saw it pre-1965 for many years, so it’s not experimental at all.)